Memo to the Climate Tsar: Leave the Robber Barons Out of It

There he goes again: Leave it to the climate tsar, John Kerry, to give the usual doom-and-gloom riff that we’re not going to cut carbon and fossil fuels fast enough to save the world. He spoke today at, you guessed it, the Davos World Economic Forum, the authoritarian central-planning globalist organization — the one with the huge office in Beijing staffed by at least 40 people — that has become his second home. To prove his point, Mr. Kerry referenced the recent rainstorm floods in California, thereby once again showing that climate alarmists have never been able to distinguish between yesterday’s weather and long-term climate changes. Of course, he would never mention that the fracking revolution and the proliferation of clean-burning natural gas use have resulted in the U.S. having the largest drop in carbon emissions of any of the major developed economies. Mr. Kerry talks about the likes of Nigeria and Uganda as places he has to save, but the reality is people in those countries and in poverty-stricken Latin America and in the less-developed economies in Asia don’t really care about global warming or climate change. What they care about is the need for growth, prosperity, jobs, technology, and a better life. They care about moving up into the middle class and away from impoverishment. They would be thrilled to have energy of any kind, whether it’s fossil fuels, or renewables, or whatever. Later on in his speech, Mr. Kerry lectured business CEOs for failing to recognize the “destructive process of growth,” which he described as “not as enlightened growth but as robber baron growth.” Now that really gets my back up. It’s bad enough that John Kerry and President Biden and the rest of the climate extremists are waging war against fossil fuels, gasoline-powered cars and gas-powered stoves and are proposing a million nanny state bureaucratic mandates, but attacking the robber barons for me is the last straw. I have written about this before and have contributed to the Fox Business “American Dynasty” show, but the Gilded Age — roughly between 1870 and 1910 — is one of the most prosperous periods in American history, with perhaps the greatest ever entrepreneurs. All of these were invented during the Gilded Age: the telegraph, telephone, railroads, autos, oil refineries, cameras, electric lights, steel, and airplanes. Think Henry Ford and autos. John D. Rockefeller and oil refined into gasoline to fuel Henry Ford’s cars. Thomas Alva Edison inventing the telegraph and the telephone. The Wright brothers and their airplane. Carnegie and steel. Who benefited the most? Working people. Like Henry Ford’s assembly line workers, who got big raises enabling them to purchase the new Model T cars. John Kerry will never understand any of this. These “robber barons” made America the envy of the world, showing the benefits of free-market capitalism. Unrivaled prosperity came from the Gilded Age and its entrepreneurial leaders. It’s the “robber barons” who made America great. Now, if John Kerry would keep his yap shut and just let today’s entrepreneurs invent new technologies that will solve climate and with a variety of other issues, we’d all be in better shape. It isn’t big-government socialism and its elitist central planners who are going to open up new and undreamed-of frontiers to solve problems, empower people, and reduce poverty. It’s free enterprise. Good, old-fashioned free-enterprise capitalism. Yesterday, Mr. Biden called Republicans “fiscally demented.” I wonder if he’s talked to his climate tsar recently? From Mr. Kudlow’s broadcast on Fox Business News.

Memo to the Climate Tsar: Leave the Robber Barons Out of It

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