“The 'Green Deal' Has Taken on a Religious Overtone”
Instead of blindly believing the disputable arguments of an anthropogenic climate change and spend trillions on 'green policies', we should invest in our capacity to cope with the change.
Heldur Meerits is a well-known entrepreneur and banker in Estonia whose opinions and comments on the problems in society and policy-making have carried weight for a long time. Now in an interview with Freedom Research, he takes aim at the 'Net Zero' movement and asks if the trillions spent on 'Green Deal' could have had a better use.
"The 'Green Deal' has taken on a religious overtone," he says. The main issue is that when talking about climate and climate change issues, there is increasingly a situation where only one 'truth' is accepted. Put simply, this 'truth' is that humans, through their emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases, are causing global warming that is irreversibly damaging the planet and will end in destruction. In other words, man-made emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases must be reduced in order to avoid catastrophe. However, not everyone shares this climate panic – many prestigous scientists in the world do not consider anthropogenic CO2 to be a significant contributor to global warming, nor do they predict an eventual catastrophe.
According to Meerits, the problem is that we do not really know with sufficient certainty whether the basic postulates of this climate crisis and related policies are true or not. "When you say how many thousands of scientists are behind these predictions, it seems rather strange. It's impossible to measure scientific truth by the number of voters," he says. A lot of the arguments in the 'climate crisis' camp, he says, are based on certain climate scenarios, and even if these scenarios were 99% likely to be correct, there would still be room for error. And more importantly, we cannot test these presumptions.
Reducing carbon just in case
So if these catastrophic climate scenarios are not a fact then why are we so keen on this 'Green Deal'? According to Meerits, the answer lies not in science but in the human psyche. "After all, what has helped humans to survive is that we are quite paranoid, afraid of the unknown," he says. Meerits cites the example of going into a forest at night and hearing someone scratching in the bush – it's probably wise to stay away from that voice since it could be a lion or bear. "And now, if there was indeed a trend towards rising temperatures, people would start to see danger in it," he says, adding how he remembers predictions from his youth that life on the planet is about to get a whole lot colder and humans will eventually have to live in perpetual winter. "People's fears probably amplify this kind of a thing, not to mention the fact that somehow bad news is more interesting to the media than the so-called average news that life will go on as it has been," Meerits says.
The question, he says, is whether and how much we should believe these end-of-the-world scenarios. When it comes to believing, Meerits says, there are two options – you either believe or you don't. "But maybe there is a third way? Maybe we can say we just don't know?" he asks. Meerits discusses that all the spending we do to reduce human emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases – and this spending can be counted into trillions of euros and dollars worldwide – is done just in case. "I think there is a whole other alternative in this situation where we don't know. Perhaps it would be better to think that we are simply adapting to changing circumstances. After all, the climate has actually changed over the millennia, and both humans and the rest of nature have adapted to these changes," he says, adding that there are certainly changes that are too rapid, but that human adaptive capacity is greater now than it was in the past, thanks to the technological tools at our disposal.

Meerits points out that adaptation can be quite practical, i.e. it could make use of all the billions and trillions of euros that are currently being spent under the name of the "Green Deal". He gives a simple example of constant power cuts in Estonia because of snowy weather – snow falls on power lines and they break. "Maybe we should change these approaches that we have? Perhaps some of the money put into the 'Green Deal' should be used to reinforce these same power lines?" he says and critically points out that instead of that, countries like Estonia pay subsidies to solar panel installation, although solar energy is not effective in Northern Europe. "Quite a waste of money in my view, except that someone's profit and loss account will come up with a few extra euros," he says.
Asked whether he thinks the so-called 'Green Deal' could be linked to the interests of certain business groups interested in making money at the expense of the taxpayer, Meerits says that although the whole thing starts out of general anxiety among voters and politicians, it does indeed provide an opportunity for some to exploit the situation for financial gain. But in his opinion, these business groups are not so influential that they could change our opinions out of their own accord.
Until money runs out?
Meerits also points out that when the Estonian government aims to equal renewable electricity production with Estonia's electricity consumption by 2030, it is a plan that cannot be based on real world conditions. "We don't get sun and wind every day and every time of day. Some additional controllable power has to come from somewhere else," he explains, adding that when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, we have more than we need – but what do we do with the surplus? Inside our region, others are likely to have wind and sun as well as that time. "Is it really realistic that we sell it all to Latvia and Finland and wherever? There should be much more of these kinds of simple calculations, so simple you can check the result by calculating it on your fingers, and much less of ideological and wishful thinking and arguments used," Meerits says.
Meerits also points to the fact that in the course of this 'Green Deal', there are quite a few issues and activities where the discourse has constantly changed, or where it is decided that something that used to be 'green' is no longer green, even though no new knowledge has been obtained about it. "10 or 15 years ago we thought that burning wood was a very environmentally friendly thing to do because new wood would grow to replace it and so on. Ten years went by and it was 'discovered' that actually burning wood is not environmentally friendly. And during those 10 years, no fundamentally new facts were procured to our knowledge. It's just reasoning that changed, so that what scientists thought to be correct 15 years ago turned out, on reflection, not to be so correct," he says.

Here a question ultimately arises: what should we do about it then? Meerits argues that we will not actually have to do much, as there will be very practical limitations to those 'green policies' – they will simply be abandoned once the money runs out. "Here in Estonia, we are definitely moving in a direction where the money is running out for various reasons. The 'Net Zero' movement is not the only reason. But when the money runs out, people start to think and look at what could be done differently," Meerits says.