23 May 2023 No, Choking Off Reliable Energy is NOT Real Capitalism

“The usual-suspect, woke-capital CEOs and activist groups are lying when they claim that their wholly political campaign to kill off reliable energy is somehow capitalism in action,” writes Free Enterprise Project Director Scott Shepard in his latest RealClearEnergy column.

Scott describes how leftist As You Sow CEO Andrew Behar kicked off shareholder season by accusing center/right shareholders “of thwarting capitalism, of censorship, of ruining the economy, and in short of everything that the ESG activists themselves so desperately pursue.”

Scott continues:

The stealth outlets of left-wing activism – disguised as consultants (e.g. McKinsey & Co.), investment houses (BlackRock, State Street), trade associations (the American Bankers Association and its affiliates) and in many other garbs – carried forward this pernicious nonsense so that the word rang out: the public/private conspiracy to choke off reliable energy, censor non-leftist speech and share private customer information with federal authorities only in the aid of Biden Administration narrative enhancement – all of that is the real capitalism.

Well, no. No, it isn’t.

Scott explains his point by looking back to our nation’s transition from horse and buggy to automobile, and then concluding with this:

What would real capitalism look like in this breathless age of “energy transition?” It would look exactly the same as it did during the rise of the auto.

No one would be forcing anybody’s behavior. No one would be violating fiduciary duties to starve flourishing and necessary industries of other peoples’ capital. There would be no pious intonations about the need for other people to sacrifice to achieve any set of impossible millenarian goals.

If a wholly viable replacement for carbon-based energy – one that produces a unit of energy more cheaply than carbon-based energy in at least the same quantities and with at least the same convenience – were available, then it would start to be adopted, and because of its superiority would eventually push out carbon-based energy in most places.

Read Scott’s commentary in entirety here.