If progressives are to be believed, the world is facing a “climate emergency” that requires the rapid elimination of fossil fuels and massive, never-ending taxpayer subsidies for wind, solar, and related infrastructure. But despite being ceaselessly propagandized by alarmist climate change messaging, a majority of Americans do not believe that global warming will pose serious threats in their own lifetimes, by a ratio of 54-to-45.

If progressive energy policies remain so unpopular with most voters, why do Democrats persist in promoting them? The answer is that they provide material benefits for both Democratic donors and progressive nonprofits. It’s an alliance of green and greed.

None of the analysis that follows is grounded in what is often attacked as “climate change denial.” Let it be stipulated that greenhouse gas emissions by modern industrial civilization are indeed causing the atmosphere to grow warmer, with some regions suffering and others benefiting as a result. Let it be stipulated that reducing the effects of those changes as quickly as possible should be a priority of U.S. energy policy. A rational case can therefore be made for a combination of mitigation—reducing greenhouse gas emissions—and adaptation—taking measures to deal with the consequences, including hotter average temperatures and slightly higher sea levels caused by melting ice.

A rational strategy to mitigate global warming (the honest term, not “climate change”) would be something like the energy expert Robert Bryce’s N2N strategy (natural gas to nuclear). In the long run, there would be a global build-out of zero-carbon nuclear power plants, with government subsidies provided as necessary. In the short run, high-emission coal in electricity generation would be phased out worldwide in favor of natural gas, which emits less carbon dioxide.

It is true that methane can be a potent greenhouse gas if it leaks into the atmosphere. But according to Tim Gould and Christophe McGlade, chief energy economist and head of the energy supply unit of the International Energy Agency (IEA), respectively, writing in “The environmental case for natural gas,” even when adverse effects of methane are taken into account the case for replacing coal with natural gas remains clear: “Despite these issues, taking into account our estimates of methane emissions from both gas and coal, on average, gas generates far fewer greenhouse-gas emissions than coal when generating heat or electricity, regardless of the timeframe considered.”

Natural gas and nuclear energy, then, would be central to a rational energy policy aimed at mitigating global warming without inflicting energy poverty on developed and developing nations alike. Fracking can cause minor earthquakes and strain water supplies, and nuclear waste disposal is a genuine issue. But if action really is needed to head off disastrous climate change now, the collateral costs of natural gas and nuclear would seem to be minor when compared to the benefits.

And yet the progressive wing of the Democratic Party and the global green social movement seek to ban natural gas and shut down all nuclear energy plants. The Greens insist that energy for a global population of 8 billion people and rising must come entirely from renewable energy sources like solar, wind, hydropower, and biomass—not millennia from now, not centuries from now, but within the space of a mere few decades, if that.

But the math doesn’t work. In 2023, renewable energy sources amounted to only 14.6% of primary energy from all sources. Thanks to massive government subsidies, renewable energy made up a larger but still minority share of global electricity generation at 30%. But about half of this comes from hydropower dams, and this kind of renewable energy is unlikely to increase much in the future. Meanwhile, the fossil fuel share of global primary energy consumption in 2023 was 81.5%.

What is the chance that renewable energy will go from being less than a fifth of global primary energy to 100% in the lifetime of anyone reading these words, if ever? Answer: net zero.

And yet even mainstream Democrats have bought into the fantasy that greenhouse gas emissions can be eliminated by 2030 or 2050 or 2100, even while banning nuclear energy and all fossil fuels including lower-carbon natural gas. When I say fantasy, I don’t mean that these goals are overly ambitious or would require greater sacrifices than we might be comfortable with. I mean that they have zero connection to any version of physical reality. Even optimistic projections by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) under the lime-green Biden administration have renewable energy accounting for no more than 44% of U.S. electricity generation in 2050, with natural gas generating 34% of electricity within that time frame. And this is electricity alone, not all primary energy, of which renewables of all kinds make up a smaller share.

What explains the disconnect between Democratic energy policies and reality?

That question has a two-word answer: Al Gore.

Al Gore never became president, having lost the Electoral College vote count to George W. Bush in 2000, despite winning a plurality of 48.4% of the popular vote (a plurality, not a majority—most Americans voted for a candidate other than Gore). But no recent Democratic president, not even Barack Obama or Bill Clinton, has had more influence on the Democratic Party’s energy policy and on its larger cosmology (and connection to reality). It was Gore who made fighting anthropogenic (human-induced) climate change central to 21st-century progressivism. And it was Gore who wrecked any chance of rational debate and bipartisan collaboration, by imparting his personal mix of apocalyptic climate alarmism and strident moralism to the Democratic Party at large.

And it was Gore who, by his example, taught American investors that they could profit from his lectures by adopting policies whose ostensible purpose is to “save the planet” from global warming but would nevertheless prove remarkably profitable for devout adherents to the gospel. In addition to winning an Oscar and a Nobel Peace Prize for his crusade against fossil fuels, Gore co-founded a Wall Street investment firm, Generation Investment, with his friend David Blood, who just happened to be the former head of asset management at Goldman Sachs. It was Gore’s freshly minted blood money that caught the attention of the party’s donor class.

In 2017, the late Charlie Munger, the longtime business partner of billionaire Warren Buffett, shared with a group of investors his understanding of how Gore had become fabulously rich in only a few years:

Al Gore has come into you fellas business … He has made $3 or $400 million in your business. And he’s not very smart. He had one obsessive idea that global warming was a terrible thing … So he found some partner to go into investment counseling with and says we’re not going to have any (carbon dioxide). But this partner is a value investor and a good one. So what they did is, is Gore hired staff to find people who didn’t put CO2 in the air. Of course that put him into services. Microsoft and all these service companies were just ideally located. And this value investor picked the best service companies. So all of a sudden the clients are making hundreds of millions of dollars and they are paying part of it to Al Gore. Al Gore has hundreds of millions [sic] dollars in your profession. And he’s an idiot. It’s an interesting story. And a true one.

In the past several decades, many rich investors have learned that green can be gold. Investing in a new nuclear plant is risky, given regulatory obstacles, upfront costs, and well-organized left-wing opposition. And it is hard for investors who hope to get rich quick to break into the oil and gas business, dominated as it is by existing firms.

In contrast, if you are wealthy enough it is easy to set yourself up as a green investor. All you have to do is use campaign finance contributions to bribe state legislators into adopting “renewable portfolio standards,” requiring that electric utilities purchase a certain amount of “renewable energy” at otherwise non-competitive prices from solar, wind, hydro, and biomass providers—which you happen to own.

Many public electric utilities used to own their own power plants. But a combination of investor interests, libertarian ideologues, and radical environmentalists have successfully pressured many state or city governments to require that their electric utilities give up their own energy production and purchase electricity in arm’s-length transactions from private electricity vendors. Yay, free market! Yay, consumer choice!

So now the stage is set. Having bribed the state legislature into forcing public utilities to buy fixed percentages of electricity from private renewable electricity vendors, you and your fellow investors can now slap together your own solar or wind or biomass plant, and use the laws you wrote as a rule book to start printing money. It’s like owning your own mint to manufacture money. Not only have you arranged to have guaranteed purchases of the renewable electricity your outfit generates, thanks to the renewable portfolio mandate, but you and your fellow capitalists can benefit from the vast amount of subsidies that governments at all levels shower on designated renewable energy sources and technologies. And while raking in money from citizens paying their electric bills and from taxpayers, you and your fellow green capitalists can feel good about yourselves, because you are “saving the planet,” practicing the kind of effective altruism made famous by the billionaire Democratic donor and convicted criminal Sam Freedman.

But wait, Democrats—it gets better! Not only Democratic donors but also Democratic nonprofits can pan for green gold in the streams of government money. Under Biden, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) for the first time allowed tax-exempt nonprofits to benefit from tax credits and rebates for “investments” in renewable energy. So much money was dispensed to nonprofits via the IRA in the guise of combating climate change that PennEnvironment, part of the Public Interest Network, provided a guide to what nonprofits needed to do to cash in:

With Elective Pay, these organizations are able to receive a payment for building or investing in qualifying clean energy projects. There are 12 clean energy tax credits that are available to nonprofits, including for the production of electricity from renewable sources like putting solar on their roofs and for purchasing commercial clean vehicles …

There are a couple steps to follow in the process of receiving these direct payments:

1. Design and implement your qualifying clean energy project. You will need to know what credit you are applying for.
2. Determine your tax year, if you don’t already know, either based upon a calendar or fiscal year.
3. Complete prefiling registration with the IRS:
   1. Create a Clean Energy Business Account for your organization at www.irs.gov/eptregister. This website also includes a comprehensive user guide and video tutorial.
   2. Select your Registrant Type (i.e., nonprofit organization or local government). This is where you will provide information about your organization.
   3. Select the credits your organization intends to claim. You will provide supporting documentation for the projects or investments.
   4. Review and submit your requests for registration numbers. Don’t worry you can save your work in progress!
   5. After you submit your registration, you can monitor its status online. If everything checks out, you will receive a registration number.
4. File your tax return and pick the corresponding direct-pay election. This is when you will provide your registration number.
5. Receive your direct payment after the tax return is processed!

In addition to subsidizing nonprofits from one direction, by exempting them from taxation in general, thanks to the Biden administration and the Democratic Congress, American taxpayers can now be dunned by the IRS for the money needed to send checks to an NGO that lobbies for transgender surgeries or defunding the police, as long as the NGO buys a Tesla to be driven to drag queen story time or slaps a solar panel atop its headquarters. A small price for American taxpayers to pay to “save the planet!”

The mystery, then, is solved. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions while securing affordable and reliable energy by relying on natural gas in the short run and nuclear energy in the long run may make sense, but it doesn’t make cents—and dollars—for Democratic donors and Democratic nonprofits. In contrast, a net zero policy justifies both investor-enriching for-profit scams like renewable portfolio standards and direct as well as indirect government subsidies to progressive nonprofits of all kinds. Net zero—in the U.S. and elsewhere—makes no sense as a rational strategy to mitigate global greenhouse gas emissions, but it is fit for purpose as what it is—a massive patronage system of pork-barrel payoffs to political clients and donors.

Just ask Al Gore, whose net worth is an estimated $300 million (from movies, books, prizes, and shares of tech company stock as well as green investments). Asking Al Gore will cost you a pretty penny, though. According to Gotham Artists, which represents him, a speech by Gore will cost you $200,00-$300,000. If that’s beyond your budget, you might consider Greta Thunberg, the Swedish climate activist and former child. She charges only $150,000-$200,000 for a talk.