As the voice of a newspaper, the Editorial Board represents an outlet’s opinion, and generally reflects the point of view of its publishers. Consisting of individual editors, columnists and journalists, the Editorial Board, and the editorials it publishes, are sort of a “with our powers combined” embodiment of the newspaper. We only bring this up because, sadly, it seems the Wall Street Journal’s is going senile.
While they’ve always offered the sort of racist, misogynist, anti-science and pro-polluter propaganda you’d expect, now it seems they’ve begun to forget even the most basic things about who they are and what year it is.
While most editorials tend to try and keep things pretty current, last Friday they seemed to have had a bit of a time slip. “Move over, Solyndra” was the opening of the editorial about Tonopah’s Crescent Dunes, a molten salt solar energy plant’s bankruptcy approval by a judge, as though this was 2011, not 2020. After all, for a “Solyndra” insult to be made in good faith and not just lazily used as a catchphrase,they’d have to believe it was before at least 2014. That’s when news broke that the DOE Loan program that funded risky innovative projects like Solyndra was turning a profit. And they certainly must think it’s not yet 2016, when loan repayments doubled the Solyndra program’s losses.
Because as we explained back when Tonopah’s Crescent Dunes solar plant declared bankruptcy in August, the failure of one of many risky investments into potentially game-changing clean technologies hardly undoes the benefits of the risky bets that paid off. What’s more, funding research and development of clean technology too risky for the private sector’s investment is exactly the sort of “innovation” policy that Republicans claim is the solution to climate change. After all, the projects funded have reduced greenhouse gasses by over 50 million metric tons.
So in criticizing the concept of the government funding a wide variety of technologies, it seems the normally loyal WSJ is forgetting that a central plank of the Republican’s (pretend) climate policy platform is innovation!
To make matters worse, on Monday, it appears the Editorial Board forgot who their own audience is in an editorial warning about financial regulations that incorporate climate risk. If your retirement is invested in the fossil fuel industry, but climate policy necessitates the winding down of the industry, that could be a problem! But not one the WSJ thinks should be regulated, apparently. Much like their column last week by Walter Russell Mead, the editorial is light on the numbers as it argues the negative effect of incorporating the risk to 401(k)s that climate policy poses.
Which is hard to believe, because as a leading business paper, hard-nosed quantitative analysis is the Wall Street Journal’s claim to fame! As its name suggests, it built its reputation on telling financial experts what they need to know to keep making money.
Yet the editorial, bereft of any real evidence of financial devastation from figuring out what the clean energy transition will mean for 401(k) and other investments, concludes by saying “masters of finance may do very well from climate-change mandates and regulation. Everyone else, watch out.”
WSJ, are you ok? You seem to have forgotten that your readers ARE the “masters of finance”. And did you forget your name and who you are? You are the WALL STREET Journal, right? The paper published by the Dow Jones division of billionaire Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp?
So why are you acting like you and your audience aren’t exactly the sort of elitist snobs who value money over all else?
