This year’s G-7 summit begins on Friday and concludes on Sunday.
We have a question: Beyond the rosy rhetoric, relief that former President Donald Trump has relinquished power, and the tranquil setting of Cornwall’s Corbis Bay, will this summit actually accomplish anything? Will it secure historical benefits for America and our allies, or simply a festival of media adoration?
This year’s host, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, has bold ambitions. He wants agreements on vaccinating the world, securing greater democratic cooperation against foreign adversaries, and consensus on new carbon emission cuts. Johnson’s proposals find paper support from the other attendees: President Joe Biden and the leaders of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the European Union.
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When it comes to the devil in the detail, however, a familiar risk appears: that the U.S. will be left to pick up the global policy tab while other attendees preach in production only of both figurative and literal hot air.
Consider what we’ve just learned about the world’s largest polluter, China. As the Wall Street Journal reported this week, China has effectively abandoned its target for reducing its emissions. This is behavior the G-7 and Biden, in particular, cannot afford to ignore.
If the United States shackles its energy production and manufacturing in the name of battling climate change, it won’t help the climate — it will merely shift manufacturing over to China, where everything will be made dirtier, cheaper, and to the benefit of a malign Communist state with global imperial designs.
No serious economist believes Biden’s aggressive climate agenda can be implemented without enormous costs to the U.S. economy in terms of lost jobs and lost prosperity. We’ve already seen those costs in the billions of dollars and thousands of jobs Biden has vaporized by killing off the Keystone XL pipeline. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal is a fiction built on vast spending and inefficient jobs. But it’s a fiction that Biden partly embraces.
State-level Democratic Party energy mandates have already led to increased energy prices for consumers. Biden must not be allowed to use the G-7 to rubber-stamp his own economically constrictive measures at home while other member states do little. China won’t be at the summit, but it deserves reproach from all attendees for its latest carbon fiction. Xi Jinping’s regime, which produces more than twice the U.S. annual carbon output, keeps giving climate lip service while burning all the coal and gas it wants.
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The G-7 ought to make it clear that western economies won’t engage in self-sabotage for the sake of climate theater.
