Tea at Trianon: Climate Policy as National Suicide

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, July 14, 2026

Climate Policy as National Suicide

From The Enterprise:

There is a simple test for whether a nation’s climate policy is serious. Ask what it does for the citizen standing in a 104°F apartment. Britain fails this test, and it fails it in a way that should terrify anyone watching Sacramento or Albany, because the failure is not an accident of implementation. It is baked into the theory. Britain has organized its entire climate regime around a single false premise, the premise that a country can purchase safety from a warming world by making itself poorer. The results are now in, and they constitute the most instructive policy experiment of the century.
Begin with the arithmetic, because everything else follows from it. In 2024 the world emitted 53.2 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases. Britain emitted 386.7 million tonnes, which is 0.73% of the total. China emitted roughly 40 Britains. The US emitted about 15. India emitted 11. And here is the number that should end every debate about unilateral sacrifice: global emissions grew by roughly 665 million tonnes in that single year, which means the world added approximately 1.7 Britains of new emissions in 12 months. If Britain had vanished from the map on January 1, 2024, ceased all economic activity, extinguished every light and grounded every aircraft, the global emissions ledger would have recovered the difference in about 7 months. This is not an argument for nihilism. It is an argument for strategic clarity. Britain cannot control the hazard. It can only control its vulnerability to the hazard. A rational government would therefore ask one question above all others: what reduces the vulnerability of the British people? The answer is adaptation, and adaptation has a price tag. The Climate Change Committee, Britain’s own official climate watchdog, estimates that the country needs approximately £11 billion annually in adaptation investment, covering flood defenses, water storage, hospital retrofits, and cooling. Note what that number implies. Adaptation is not a moral posture. It is a capital expenditure, and capital expenditures require capital, which requires a productive economy, which requires cheap and reliable energy.
Now observe what Britain actually did. The Office for National Statistics reports that output in Britain’s energy-intensive industries has fallen by roughly one-third since 2021. Non-domestic electricity prices nearly doubled between early 2021 and late 2023. By 2023, British industrial electricity prices were the highest among all 24 countries reporting to the International Energy Agency, nearly 50% above French and German levels and approximately 4 times American and Canadian levels. Think about what that sentence means. The country that needs £11 billion a year to protect itself from heat and flooding has engineered the most expensive industrial electricity in the developed world, driving out the very industries whose tax revenue and productive capacity would fund the protection. Britain is not trading prosperity for safety. It is liquidating the capital account that safety would have been drawn against. (Read more.)