There is no compelling reason for humanity to convert en masse to play-like energy forms

 This move is positive, not only in and of itself, but because it come from a newly elected non-Trumpist Republican governor. He's not grandstanding or kowtowing to a cult. He's just a guy who understands the basic economic flaws in an agreement his state had entered into:

This week, Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin announced his intention to withdraw the Commonwealth of Virginia from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a pact of 11 states requiring power plants inside those states to purchase “allowances” to emit a determined amount of carbon dioxide.

Governor-elect Youngkin said, “RGGI describes itself as a regional market for carbon. But it is really a carbon tax that is fully passed on to ratepayers. It’s a bad deal for Virginians. It a bad deal for Virginia businesses.”

Would that more leaders around the globe understood this. 

The Biden administration clearly doesn't, pressing ahead as it is with its $5 trillion (yes, that's the figure the CBO has calculated for the cost once everything is taken into consideration) climate alarmism-driven Build Back Better plan even as the Associated Press's feet turn cold given our present inflation reality. 

Most of Europe has yet to get a clue:

Germany's new traffic-light political coalition—the red SPD, the yellow Free Democrats, and the Greens—is making the Paris climate agreement its top priority. In April, Germany's constitutional court ruled that its 2050 net-zero target was so distant that it violated the freedoms of young people. So, along with Sweden, Germany became the first country to legislate a 2045 net-zero target. Yet the new German government's net-zero plan, as outlined in the coalition agreement, may as well have been designed to worsen Europe's current energy crisis and sink its largest and most successful economy.

Under the timetable inherited from the Merkel government, zero-emitting nuclear power—which only a decade ago accounted for one-fourth of German electricity generation—will be phased out by the end of next year. To make matters worse, the new coalition is bringing forward the closure of all Germany's coal-fired power stations from 2038 to 2030 and at the same time raising the share of renewables to 80 percent. Notes energy expert Lucian Pugliaresi, Germany's energy policy initiatives "will not be sufficient to meet demand for electricity in Germany in 2030."

Germany's loss is Vladimir Putin's gain—burning more natural gas will be the only way for the country to keep the lights on. That means higher natural gas prices across northern Europe, and a continent more dependent for its energy on a dangerous geopolitical rival.

The biggest disappointment among would-be climate leaders so far has been the host of the recent U.N. climate conference: Britain and its prime minister, Boris Johnson. Britain made its bid for climate leadership in the waning days of the premiership of Johnson's predecessor in the summer of 2019. Theresa May had already announced her decision to step down when she latched on to net zero as her prime ministerial legacy. After a 90-minute debate in the House of Commons, with no cost estimates and no vote, Britain became the first major country to write net zero into law.

A small clique of politicians close to the outgoing prime minister seized on the prospect of Britain winning the presidency of the 2020 UN climate conference (later pushed back to 2021 because of COVID-19) to save face post-Brexit. One of them, former energy secretary Amber Rudd, told Politicothat she thought it would "help bind the U.K. closer to the EU" on climate and energy. It amounts to a reverse case of Boris Johnson's famed cakeism—instead of having your cake and eating it, Britain would have the disadvantages of being tied to the EU without the benefits of EU membership.

Having gotten into the business of climate leadership, Britain made "keeping 1.5 alive"—the maximum temperature rise of 1.5°C that net zero is meant to deliver—the main goal of the Glasgow conference. The result was humiliation. By its end, UN secretary general António Guterres had declared 1.5 "on life support" and the British president of the conference was fighting back tears.

The facts don't bear out this headlong rush to move away from normal-people energy forms:

What the UN report and the underlying scientific literature do say is that, even as natural and growing human influences have warmed the globe 1.1 C since 1900, most extreme weather events have remained within natural variability. The UN’s best estimate is that we’ll see an additional 1.6 C warming by 2100, an increase that is expected to have minimal net economic impact. That’s quite plausible since the 20th century saw a quadrupling of the global population and the greatest improvement ever in human wellbeing, even with the 1.1 C rise.

Science also confirms that we have time. As first recognized in the Nobel prize–winning work of William Nordhaus, an optimal path to “net zero” emissions would balance the disruption of too-rapid a reduction of carbon dioxide emissions (or decarbonization) against a growing risk of detrimental climate impacts. While there are many uncertainties in estimating that balance, future impacts appear to be small, thus suggesting that today’s mitigation plans are too hasty. To enable a graceful and economically viable energy transition in the coming decades, we must better observe and understand the changing climate and develop better emissions-lite technologies.

The alarmists are wont to exploit every natural disaster of newsworthy magnitude, but the fact is that natural-disaster deaths have been in sharp decline for a century:

Not that you’d know it, if you had half an eye on the headlines this summer. The floods, fires and heatwaves that plagued the world were, for many observers, proof that the impacts of climate change have already become catastrophic. In Europe, more than 150 people died in flooding. In the United States, wildfire season started earlier and lasted longer, razing hundreds of thousands of acres. Around the world, hundreds died from heatwaves.

But again, it’s worth reminding ourselves of the facts: there has been a 92% decline in the per decade death toll from natural disasters since its peak in the 1920s. In that decade, 5.4 million people died from natural disasters. In the 2010s, just 0.4 million did. Globally, the five-year period ending in 2020 had the fewest natural disaster deaths of any five-year period since 1900. And this decline occurred during a period when the global population nearly quadrupled — and temperatures rose more than 1°C degree centigrade above pre-industrial levels.

You see, there's an important factor in all this that must be taken into account: human ingenuity:

What determines whether people die in heat waves is not whether temperatures rose to 110°F — or even 115°F— instead of 109°F. It is whether or not they have air conditioning. Heat-related deaths have halved in the US since 1960 — even as the population expanded and heat waves grew in frequency, intensity, and length — because more and more people did.

Though climate alarmists steadfastly ignore it, our capacity to adapt is extraordinary. We are very good at protecting people from natural disasters — and getting better. To take just one example, France in 2006 had 4,000 fewer deaths from a heat wave than anticipated thanks to improved health care, an early-warning system and greater public consciousness in response to a deadly heat wave three years earlier. Even poor, climate-vulnerable nations like Bangladesh saw deaths from natural disasters decline massively thanks to low-cost weather surveillance and warning systems and storm shelters.

Climate alarmists have been wildly off the mark with their predictions for over 50 years.  The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times were, with a straight face, reporting Paul Erlich's prognostications of famine by 1975 and humanity's disappearance "in a cloud of blue steam" within twenty years in 1969. In the early 1970s, the Washington Post and the Boston Globe ran stories taking alarmists' (scientists, doncha know) claims that an ice age would be upon us by the end of the twentieth century seriously. Acid rain had its run as the star crisis of the 1980s, until the National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program said "never mind" in 1990. James Hansen's drought predictions were proven to be a lot of hooey. And, of course, there's the polar ice cap disappearance that wasn't. 

Still, the overlords will not brook any suggestion that some reconsideration might be in order:

Take the experience of statistician and sceptical environmentalist, Bjorn Lomborg. Earlier this year he was invited to give a public lecture at Duke University, only to be met by high-profile calls for it to be cancelled from Duke professors and assorted climate activists. Duke held its nerve, and the lecture went ahead, but not without Lomborg being denounced as a ‘professional climate denier’ – and all because he questions the economic wisdom of certain aspects of climate-change policymaking. 

Or take the decision of the BBC in 2018 to ban, effectively, any debate over climate change. This decision followed activists’ outcry over its 2014 decision to allow Lord Lawson, a former chancellor of the exchequer and a critic of climate alarmism, to appear on Radio 4’s Today programme. The BBC said it had got its coverage of climate change ‘wrong too often’ and told staff: ‘You do not need a “denier” to balance the debate.’ 

Now even those who are concerned about climate change, but who ‘downplay’, as the Independent put it, ‘the need for immediate and radical cuts to greenhouse gas emissions’, are being accused of denialism. Apparently, ‘delay is the new denial’.

Indeed, influential climate scientist Michael Mann argues that anyone who inhibits the need for drastic action right this very moment, perhaps by talking hopefully of ‘adaptation’, ‘geoengineering’ or ‘carbon capture’, is just a climate denier in optimist’s clothing. ‘The greatest threat’, concludes one politician, ‘is now posed by those who purport to accept the scientific consensus, but refuse to respond at the pace science demands’.

Let's speak plainly. Climate alarmism is one piece of a larger impetus that has seen to it that Western civilization declines to the point of being  unrecognizable. Human advancement that has made possible the safety, comfort, convenience and variety of modern life, and lifted millions out of poverty over the last two centuries, is, in this reading, a negative, an arrogant assertion of privilege by our species, which, since, in this reading, is no better than any other in this relativity-governed universe.

It is such a glaringly off-base vision that it will surely play itself out someday. The question is how much harm it will do in the meantime.