Suppose everything you hear in the news about climate change is true. Suppose climate change is real, suppose it is primarily due to the burning of fossil fuels, and suppose that if this continues, the costs will be significant. Suppose all this is true. How should those who disagree with the likely massive government response that could follow actually challenge it?

According to many on the left, accepting the above would mean game over for a wide range of liberties. But buying into this assumption is a mistake. When leftists claim that only a bigger government can deliver affordable health care or quality education, the response from conservatives and libertarians is not to deny that illness or ignorance exists. Instead, those who love liberty argue that more government is not the best way to achieve these goals, and in fact have developed their own set of conservative policy responses — such as high-deductible savings accounts and school vouchers — in place of government-based solutions.

The same approach can and should be taken with respect to climate change. The reality is that some of the best ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and protect against the dangers of a hotter world involve less government, not more. I’ll focus here on three: 1) cutting regulatory red tape for clean energy sources, 2) removing restrictions on energy competition, and 3) eliminating environmentally harmful subsidies.

Cutting Regulatory Red Tape

Some of the most promising forms of zero-carbon energy are hamstrung by regulations. Nuclear power, for instance, provides the majority of zero-carbon energy used in the United States today and is a proven source of safe and reliable electricity. Yet between 1978 and 2012, no nuclear reactors were approved in the United States. And of the new plants announced since then, most have been canceled due to cost overruns.

The costliness of nuclear power has many causes, but regulatory compliance is a major factor. A recent study by the American Action Forum found that the average nuclear reactor faces $219 million in regulatory liabilities, with some companies facing regulatory liabilities of more than $8 billion. Granted, nuclear power involves a unique set of risks that may call for special regulation. But the costliness of the current approval process in both time and money is vastly out of proportion to the risks involved.

Hydropower, another zero-carbon energy source, faces similar permitting problems. Hydro-power had the potential to grow by as much as 50 percent, and many existing dams that could be used for power generation currently cannot do so. The permitting process, however, is full of redundancies and can be gamed for delay. Removing these obstacles would help clean energy thrive without increasing the state’s footprint.

Expanding Market Competition

Conservatives and libertarians have long recognized the power of market competition to drive innovation. Yet in much of the United States, market competition for electricity is illegal.

Instead, electricity is provided by monopoly utilities, which are protected from competition and have their rates approved by some form of government body. Decisions as to whether to keep a power plant online are as much political as they are economic.

This system was not designed to keep emissions high but, in practice, it has had that effect. In the past decade, emissions from the power sector have fallen rapidly as low-cost natural gas has displaced higher-emitting coal as the nation’s largest power source. More recently, falling prices for wind and solar power have started to make those technologies more competitive as well. Yet states, where electricity providers are insulated from competition, have often resisted this change. Electricity rates in monopoly states are set based on “cost recovery,” which means that the more money a utility spends, the higher the rates it can charge. As a result, utilities face less market pressure to close uneconomical plants and may even spend large amounts of money to keep plants in operation because they are guaranteed cost recovery.

The lack of competition has also made utilities less responsive to the growing consumer demand for so-called “green energy.” The number of “green choice” customers in states with retail competition increased by 142 percent over a two-year period (from 2010 to 2012) while remaining flat in states without retail choice. And Texas, which has the freest electricity market in the nation, also has the most wind-power generation.

Finally, even those coal plants that have remained in operation under competition have tended to emit less CO2 than comparable plants elsewhere. Between 1991 and 2005, states that restructured their electricity market to allow more competition saw improved fuel efficiency from coal plants, resulting in a 6 percent reduction in CO2 emissions from those plants.

Eliminating Environmentally Harmful Subsidies

As the Hippocratic Oath states, the first duty of a physician is to do no harm. Yet all too often in the political realm, the government encourages environmentally destructive behavior through subsidies and other government spending. Climate change is no exception.

Consider flood insurance. Even if we were to radically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we would still need to prepare for the warming from past emissions, part of which will involve adapting to higher sea levels. Yet current federal and state policies encourage people to live near the coast, where they will be in greater danger from storms and flooding.

The National Flood Insurance Program, for instance, provides below-market-rate flood insurance policies to people living in flood-prone areas. Originally meant as a way to provide people with insurance not available on the private market, the NFIP has racked up billions in debt while undercutting the private flood insurance market. For our purposes, the critical fact is that the NFIP encourages people to live and build in flood-prone areas, increasing our national vulnerability to climate-related harms. As Hayek famously observed, prices convey information. In a market system, if a property in an area is at an increased risk of flooding, the cost of insuring the property will be higher, which will discourage unnecessary development. By contrast, when the NFIP offers below-market-rate insurance policies along the coast, they are sending people the (false) signal that the risks are lower than they really are. Stopping this perverse practice would help people better assess how to minimize the risks that come from a warming climate.

The examples given above are only a few of the many possible conservative responses to climate change. My goal has not been to offer a comprehensive list, but rather to show that it is simply not true that policies to address climate change must result in bigger government. Advocates of liberty should not be afraid to tackle the climate issue directly. Instead, we should be bold in proclaiming what we know from other political issues. Limited government principles are perfectly capable of dealing with the most pressing problems of the day, including climate change.

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This article was published by Law & Liberty and is reproduced with permission.

Most politicians and activists have strong views on every political issue. Those views grow from their fundamental political philosophies and beliefs. The best politicians know how to balance their political ideals with a keen watch on how they affect the lives of everyday Americans — those who voted them into office. Go too far with your ideological preferences in the face of evidence that it’s hurting the American people, and you will not go far in politics. The Democratic Party seems poised to take a beating for forgetting this fundamental maxim when it comes to energy and climate change. They feel so strongly about the issue that many have lost touch with reality. They have entered a sort of make-believe world. The coming election is going to bring them back to reality.

Republicans are not immune to ideological overstepping. Republicans in general believe in the private sector. They believe that free markets offer more benefits for society than government spending and mandates. The theory has proven correct far more than it hasn’t, but not always. When a so-called private sector line of business becomes so corrupt, so dominated by Washington political favoritism, and so mismanaged that it’s offering worse products and worse prices than government options, then even limited-government free market activists need to take notice. Those who don’t will pay a political price. The private student loan industry is a prime example. Created and supported by Republicans, it became so corrupt and so mismanaged that eventually, it was impossible to defend. The few who tried paid a political price.

On climate change, the Democrats face a similar dilemma, except with politically apocalyptic consequences. Student loans are important; they affect a lot of people. Energy is different; it affects everyone. Skyrocketing energy prices cause widespread economic disruption. In the extreme, they lead to starvation, heat stroke, freezing and death. It’s not a policy area you can get wrong. Yet American and global policymakers have deliberately done just that. The left’s energy policies make zero sense.

Clean energy is a worthy goal overshadowed by lofty expectations that outpace the pragmatism of working people. For large segments of the left, the climate change issue has become more like a religion than a policy debate. Pesky facts like technological limitations and costs are thrown aside in favor of magic. “Ban fossil fuels and utopia will follow” is essentially the mindset. (RELATED: Democrats Look To Sustainable Investing Craze As Means For Pushing Climate Agenda).

In the real world, you have to take into account technological limitations, costs, and other trade-offs. Transitioning energy production too fast can cause real present-day harm. The rich can afford to ignore high prices, slower economic growth, and a reduction in national security. 

President Joe Biden campaigned on “getting rid of” fossil fuels. If there were economically efficient alternatives that would allow this to happen without slamming American families and harming America’s national security, that would be a less radical thing to say. Those things do not exist at scale today.

America became energy independent during the Trump years. This energy independence brought huge advantages. First, America’s fracking boom and the massive expansion of natural gas production that came with it lowered carbon emissions more than any regulation. Second, American energy independence changed the national security dynamic with respect to huge energy-exporting countries in the Middle East and Russia. Finally, the lower energy prices that followed led to massive economic and manufacturing growth. Many dormant small towns in America literally came alive as a result.

Throwing all this away without an adequate and, importantly, cheaper alternative in place is almost unimaginable from a policy perspective, but that’s exactly what happened. By promoting so-called Environmental, Social and Governance, or ESG, investment standards to choke off fossil fuel investments, by canceling pipelines, and by limiting federal oil and gas leasing, the left has reduced American energy production and left America vulnerable to the rest of the world. All this has come with very little emissions benefit to boot. It has just enabled Russia, Saudi Arabia, and others to displace American fossil fuel production with their own foreign fossil fuel production. The result? From Biden’s inauguration to the onset of the war in Ukraine — before the much-discussed “Putin price hike,” in other words — American gas prices went up nearly 50%. Those prices are up another 15% on top of that since the war began.

There have been huge technological strides in solar, wind and other renewable power sources, but primarily due to their intermittent nature and a still-huge gap in energy storage (battery) technology, those forms of energy are not yet ready to make up for lost fossil fuel production without massive extra cost. (RELATED: ANALYSIS: White House Keeps Misleading Public On Oil, Gas Leasing. Here Are The Facts)

Giving away a huge economic and national security advantage is political malpractice. Slowing American energy production while begging the Saudis to increase their own fossil fuel production, as Biden is doing this week, is a botch so foreseeable it should be disqualifying for future leadership. Energy policy under the Biden administration has been insane. With prices booming, everyone now knows it. Those who got us in this mess should prepare to pay a massive political price.

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This article was published in Daily Caller was republished with permission.

One week after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency could not regulate carbon dioxide emissions from power plants because the agency lacks congressional authorization to do so, the Biden Department of Transportation (DOT) proposed a rule targeting CO2 emissions from highway vehicles, for which DOT also has no legal authority.

DOT’s Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) is proposing a rule that would require states and municipalities to “track and reduce greenhouse gas emissions on their highways.” In keeping with a regulatory tradition that is as longstanding as it is misleading, DOT assures the public that the “carbon reduction program” contained in the rule will be “flexible,” allowing state DOTs and metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) to “set their own targets.” That flexibility quickly disappears, however, when the DOT adds that the declining targets must “align” with the Biden administration’s “net-zero targets” as outlined in two executive orders and commitments made at the International Leaders Climate Summit.

The scheme to have state DOTs and metropolitan planning organizations set ever-declining targets for emissions from on-road vehicles has no basis in law. Congress has never instructed DOT to take any such step. As close as it came were a few provisions in last year’s bipartisan infrastructure bill that established a few CO2 emissions-reduction programs at DOT. But nowhere in that legislation was DOT granted the authority to require vehicular emissions targets, much less targets that serve any “net-zero” goal.

In the Supreme Court’s decision in West Virginia v. EPA, the High Court ruled that EPA lacked statutory authority to regulate CO2 emissions from power plants. The same legal principle applies here. DOT’s proposed rule will trigger lawsuits arguing that the Biden administration’s action violates the separation of powers the court upheld in West Virginia v. EPA. Citing that precedent, plaintiffs will say that executive branch DOT officials acted unconstitutionally by assuming powers that only the legislative branch can grant. If the case makes it to the Supreme Court (and that could take years), and if that body is composed as it is now, the DOT’s power grab is likely to go the way of the Obama/Biden plan to regulate CO2 emissions from power plants.

Clearing the Way for EVs

In a rare moment of regulatory candor, the administration acknowledges in the docket supporting DOT’s proposed rule that DOT’s scheme will ultimately encourage Americans to switch from gasoline-powered cars to EVs.

“The potential benefits that may flow from the proposed greenhouse gas measure stem from its potential to support more informed choices about transportation investments and other policies to achieve net-zero emissions economy-wide by 2050, including projects eligible under the Carbon Reduction Program and the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Program, both established under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law,” the docket said.

Doing away with conventionally-powered automobiles, and replacing them with EVs, has been part of the Biden administration’s larger war on fossil fuels. While sales of EVs continue to creep up, so do their prices, keeping them well beyond the reach of ordinary Americans. The cost of the raw materials that go into EV batteries continues to soar, and the recharging infrastructure needed to support the millions of EVs said soon to be zipping down our highways is barely in its infancy.

Neither the Biden administration nor the automakers thumping their chests over their embrace of EVs have offered any realistic explanation for where the electricity for all these EVs will come from in a post-fossil-fuel world. Certainly not from windmills and solar panels. Nor has sufficient thought been given to how today’s already shaky grid is going to hold up under the stress of providing power to a growing number of EVs.

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This article was published by CFACT, Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow and is reproduced with permission.