The Wall Street Journal is known as a sober, somewhat-staid publication originally meant for finance types to pore over stock market news and goings on in “the Street.” More recently, it has become an alternative for thinking people who are sick of the screeching from The New York Times and The Washington Post but who’d still like an establishment take from a national news publication.
It’s somewhat surprising, therefore, to read a blistering op-ed by their Editorial Board, but on Sunday evening that’s exactly what they delivered. They take climate fanatics Al Gore and John Kerry to the proverbial woodshed over their bullying of the World Bank.
In response to Gore/Kerry’s pressure tactics, the centrists at the paper made a great point:
When Al Gore, John Kerry and the New York Times gang up on someone, you know a political hit is on. That’s what happened last week to World Bank President David Malpass, for the sin of not turning the international lending institution into an arm of Democratic Party policy on climate change.
At issue? The WSJ board accuses Kerry and Gore of harassing World Bank President David Malpass for not bowing to their every whim and demand. The World Bank’s purpose is to alleviate poverty around the globe, so its outlook is not necessarily the same as the elites on Martha’s Vineyard and in Silicon Valley.
The Journal points out that bringing third-world countries into the first world…
…requires energy, which today is still most efficiently and affordably provided by fossil fuels . Yet Mr. Kerry recently cautioned African leaders against investing in long-term natural gas production, as if they have an alternative if they want to develop.
This is an indulgence in a place like California, which is affluent enough to pay twice what its neighboring states do for energy. [Emphasis mine.]
By the way, no, California is not affluent enough to pay twice what its neighbors pay. People are moving out in droves because they can’t afford to live here. But I digress. The editorial continues:
…it amounts to condemning countries in Africa and much of the developing world to more decades of poverty.
Although California is not Africa, similar dynamics are at play. The powers-that-be say they’re going to ban gas-powered cars by 2035, but in the next breath, they beg you not to charge your car because the electric grid can’t handle it. Simply put, you can’t shut off the gas unless you have a replacement–and they don’t. Asking Africa to starve so Gore and Kerry can feel better about climate change is ludicrous. You’d think they’d have learned their lesson after seeing the disaster that unfolded in Sri Lanka (covered here by our Joe Cunningham) while trying to have a developing country hurt itself to appease the climate gods.
The WSJ piles on:
Kerry may even be consigning poor countries to needless hunger from rising prices and perhaps a global shortage of natural gas for fertilizer. Climate monomania is easier to preach with a sea-side view from a bluff in Martha’s Vineyard than it is from a village with unreliable electricity in the Congo.
As the world is painfully learning, the technology doesn’t exist for a rapid transition to a world without fossil fuels. [Emphasis mine.]
Then they come in with the hammer:
Lectures from Mr. Kerry are hard to take when he travels around the world by carbon-spewing private jet or government aircraft. As for Mr. Gore, he has been predicting climate doom for decades even as he invests in green energy backed by copious government subsidies. And what do they have to show for their decades of climate advocacy? They hold conferences and set unrealistic emissions targets. But the U.S. emissions reductions in recent decades are almost entirely the result of the expansion of natural gas production that the climate lobby wants to shut down.
Exactly. Thank you, Wall Street Journal, for knocking these two climate hustlers down a peg or two.