As we’ve said before, there is no logical connection between fighting climate change being necessary and it being cheap. It could be that we face an existential crisis that’s going to cost us a fortune to cope with, though at CDN we don’t believe it, at least not the first part. But it is odd how many people who think there is a climate crisis automatically assume that the solutions are not only cheap but will make us better off. And they carry on with this belief no matter how many examples pile up showing it to be untrue. Such as Canary Media grumbling that “Hawaiʻi committed to 100% clean energy. Now it’s flirting with natural gas. Gov. Josh Green, a Democrat, wants to import LNG to slash energy bills. But the move might not lead to savings – and it could trip up the state’s climate goals.” In the real world, the more a jurisdiction bets on the green energy transition the higher its energy bills, and the more irritated its voters. Any fool can say “Making the transition to renewable, indigenous resources for power generation will allow us to keep more of that money at home, thereby improving our economy, environment and energy security.” And Green’s predecessor David Ige did say it. But people looking at the bills didn’t believe it… nor should they have.

A guest item on David Blackmon’s Energy Additions Substack carries the title “Everybody Wants to be Green, But Nobody Wants to Pay For it”. Which seems to be a fair comment. But here’s the thing, or one of them. If people like Gov. Ige had been right, you wouldn’t have to “pay for it”. You’d save money. Which evidently, among many others, maritime shippers are discovering they don’t. Like Hawaiians. And Californians.

Of course there’s also a strong tendency for people who think there is no climate crisis to think that the fuels that humans have chosen for their affordability over many decades are actually more affordable. And there’s no logical reason that cheaper fuels would also be environmentally benign, though at CDN we do believe it. But wherever you fall on either question, we do insist that you should be able to evaluate them independently. Speaking very generically, there is no inherent connection between the severity of a problem and the ease of fixing it. (And here we don’t just mean the Canadian military spending $1.2 million on a study of “zero emission light armoured vehicles” only to find there aren’t any but “Managers said they remained committed to meeting climate targets despite research indicating green military technology is non-existent, too costly or impractical.”) But to the extent that there is a pattern, generally the worse a problem is the harder it is to fix. And blithely denying it has cost global warming zealots a lot of credibility, and is still doing so.