Essay by Eric Worrall
“… (“letting the market decide”) can’t be the only factor without … externalities …”
JANUARY 7, 2026
Net Zero: Fantasy, Red Herring, or Reality?
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Falsehoods abound as vested interests distract from the growing dangers, encouraging business as usual to keep oil sales in the black: … The assault on truth goes unchecked, ensuring that a lucrative hydrocarbon-based economy continues to pay out, rather than providing clean green energy for industry, transportation, and buildings.
Others have even done an about-turn, such as Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, whose 2021 book How To Avoid A Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have And The Breakthroughs We Need sounded promising, but has shown himself to be more interested in making money than stopping an increasingly warming world. …
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Trump’s fire-fuel thinking is retrograde in the extreme, including increased oil subsidies, resurrecting dead coal plants (more than 2 times as expensive as solar), …
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Unfortunately, the transition is being slowed by private interests and a lunatic American idea that the past is somehow the way forward. …
What customers and manufacturers want (“letting the market decide”) can’t be the only factor without including all externalities, such as pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. Repealing long-standing fuel-economy standards that increased a woeful miles-per-gallon inefficiency of combustion engines (more completely burning higher-octane gasoline) means more pollution on the streets – more deaths, disease, and dementia from particulate matter, carbon monoxide, NOx, volatile organic compounds, lead, arsenic, …. Pretending plug-in hybrids are a solution is a red herring that postpones the switch to EVs, doing little to counter toxic pollution and global warming. Hybrids are almost as bad as gasmobiles, while an EV is better for the environment after only two years.
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John K. White, a former lecturer in physics and education at University College Dublin and the University of Oviedo. He is the editor of the energy news service E21NS and author of The Truth About Energy: Our Fossil-Fuel Addiction and the Transition to Renewables (Cambridge University Press, 2024) and Do The Math!: On Growth, Greed, and Strategic Thinking (Sage, 2013). He can be reached at: johnkingstonwhite@gmail.com
Read more: https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/01/07/net-zero-fantasy-red-herring-or-reality/
Externalities are costs or benefits which affect a party who is not directly involved in a transaction. For example, if a mine dumps all its toxic waste into a nearby river, the mine benefits by minimising its cost of disposing of the waste. But everyone downstream off that mine has just had their water supply poisoned. The externality in this case is the illness and ruined crops caused by the toxic pollution.
But not all externalities are negative. A significant externality of CO2 emissions is more vigorous crop growth. Farmers don’t have to pay everyone else to emit CO2, but they benefit from a substantial CO2 fertilisation effect caused by those emissions which their ancestors did not enjoy.
When greens claim green technologies like renewables and EVs are cheaper, their claims implicitly include a bunch of negative externalities you likely don’t agree with, and appear to ignore the positive externalities of emitting CO2.
They never seem to consider the possibility they are wrong, that their alarmist externalities have been wildly exaggerated or simply don’t exist.
Even the claim that EVs are less polluting is open to question. Not only does charging EVs in most cases involve a bunch of conversion losses the good professor neglected to mention, the operation of EVs might actually produce more toxic pollution than equivalent gasoline vehicles.
Professor Emeritus John K White doesn’t want the market to choose, perhaps because he knows most people don’t choose green technology of their own free will, without substantial penalties or incentives to drive the choice towards green options. He doesn’t think the market should decide, because he knows large numbers of people don’t embrace his list of green priorities.
But history teaches free markets produce better solutions than experts caught up in groupthink fantasies.
Expertocracies create economic disasters, like today’s EU disaster zone, the Lysenkoism, long queues and shortages in the former Soviet Union, or the slow motion train wreck which is today’s Chinese economy.
Free markets create wealth and prosperity, like the United States of America.
If climate change ever were to cause a problem, the solution will come from free market economies, not from managed economies. Managed economies don’t solve problems, they cause problems.
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