Politicized sustainability threatens planet and people by Paul Driessen

It drives anti-fossil fuel agendas and threatens wildlife, jobs, and human health and welfare

Sustainability (sustainable development) is one of the hottest trends on college campuses, in the news media, in corporate boardrooms and with regulators. There are three different versions.

Real Sustainability involves thoughtful, caring, responsible, economical stewardship and conservation of land, water, energy, metallic, forest, wildlife and other natural resources. Responsible businesses, families and communities practice this kind of sustainability every day: polluting less, recycling where it makes sense, and using less energy, water and raw materials to manufacture the products we need.

Public Relations Sustainability mostly involves meaningless, superficial, unverifiable, image-enhancing assertions that a company is devoted to renewable fuels, corporate responsibility, environmental justice, reducing its carbon footprint – or sustainability. Its primary goal is garnering favorable press or appeasing radical environmental groups.

Politicized Sustainability is the untenable, even dangerous variety. It relies on ideological assertions and theoretical models as an alternative to actual outside-our-windows reality and evidence. Like “dangerous manmade climate change,” its real purpose is gaining greater agitator and government control over people’s energy use, lives, livelihoods, liberties and living standards. It reflects an abysmal understanding of basic energy, economic, resource extraction, manufacturing and human rights realities.

The most common definition is that “we may meet the needs of current generations” only to the extent that doing so “will not compromise the ability of future generations to meet their needs.”

Among other alleged human wrong doing, Political Sustainability thus reflects the assertion that we are rapidly depleting finite resources. Therefore, we must reduce our current needs and wants in order to save those resources for future generations. At first blush, it sounds logical, and even ethical.

However, under sustainability precepts, we are supposed to predict future technologies – and ensure that today’s resource demands will not compromise the completely unpredictable energy and raw material requirements that those completely unpredictable future technologies will introduce. We are supposed to safeguard the assumed needs of future generations, even if it means ignoring or compromising the undeniable needs of current generations – including the needs, aspirations, health and welfare of the most impoverished, malnourished, disease-ravaged, energy-deprived, politically powerless people on Earth.

For thousands of years, mankind advanced at a snail’s pace. Then, as the modern fossil-fuel industrial era found its footing, progress picked up rapidly, until the speed of change became almost exponential. How today is anyone supposed to predict what might be in store ten, fifty or a hundred years from now?

Moreover, as we moved from flint to copper, to bronze, iron, steel and beyond, we didn’t do so because mankind had exhausted Earth’s supplies of flint, copper, tin and so forth. We did it because we innovated. We invented something better, more efficient, more practical. Each advance required different materials. 

Who today can foresee what future technologies we will have … and what raw materials those future technologies will require? How we are supposed to ensure that future families can meet their needs, if we cannot possibly know what those needs will be?

Why then would we even think of empowering activists and governments to regulate today’s activities – based on wholly unpredictable future technologies, lifestyles, needs and resource demands? Why would we ignore or compromise the pressing needs of current generations, to meet those totally unpredictable future needs?

“Resource depletion” claims also fail to account for new technologies that increase energy and mineral reserves, reduce their costs – or decrease the need for certain raw materials: copper, for instance, because lightweight fiber optic cables made from silica (one of Earth’s most abundant minerals) can carry thousands of times more information than a huge bundle of copper wires that weigh 800 times more.

In 1887, when Wisconsin’s Hearthstone House became the world’s first home lit by hydroelectric power, no one could foresee how electricity would come to dominate, enhance and safeguard our lives in the myriad ways it does today. No one could envision the many ways we generate electricity today.

120 years later, no one predicted tiny cellular phones with superb digital cameras and more computing and networking power than a big 1990 desktop computer. No one expected that we would need so much cadmium, lithium, rare earth metals and other raw materials to manufacture thousands of wind turbines.

No one anticipated that new 4-D seismic, deepwater drilling and hydraulic fracturing technologies would find and produce so much oil and natural gas that today we still have at least a century’s worth of these vital energy resources – which “experts” had just told us we would run out of in only a few more years.

And yet, we are still supposed to predict the future 50 or 100 years from now, safeguard the assumed needs of future generations, and ignore the clear needs of current generations. We are also supposed to presume that today’s essential natural resources have to last forever. In reality, they only have to last long enough for our creative intellects to discover real, actually workable replacements: new deposits, production techniques, raw material substitutes or technologies.

Of course, all of this is irrelevant to Politicized Sustainability dogma. That doctrine focuses on ridding the world of fossil fuels, regardless of any social, economic, environmental or human costs of doing so. And regardless of whether supposed alternatives really are eco-friendly and sustainable.

For example, mandated U.S. ethanol quotas eat up 40% of this nation’s corn, grown on over 36 million acres of cropland, to replace 10% of America’s gasoline. Corn ethanol also requires billions of gallons of water, and vast quantities of pesticides, fertilizers, tractor fuel and natural gas … to produce energy that drives up food prices, damages small engines, gets one-third fewer miles per gallon than gasoline – and during its entire production and use cycle emits just as much carbon dioxide as gasoline.

Imagine replacing 100% of US gasoline with corn ethanol. How would that in any way be sustainable?

Mandated, subsidized wind energy requires millions of acres for turbines and ultra-long transmission lines … and billions of tons of concrete, steel, copper, rare earth metals and fiberglass. The turbines’ subsonic noise and light flicker create chronic health problems for susceptible people living near them, and kill millions of birds and bats annually – to produce expensive, intermittent, unreliable electricity that must be backed up by dozens of fossil fuel generators or billions of (nonexistent) land- and resource-intensive battery arrays. 

Meanwhile, American and Canadian companies are cutting down thousands of acres of forests and turning millions of trees into wood pellets that they truck to coastal ports and transport on oil-fueled cargo ships to England. There the pellets are hauled by truck and burned in place of coal, to generate electricity … so that England can meet its renewable fuel targets. How is this sustainable – or “climate friendly”?

Why not just build the fossil fuel power plants … mine for coal and frack for natural gas to fuel them – or build more nuclear power plants – and forget about the ethanol, wind turbines, wood pellets and other pseudo-renewable, pseudo-sustainable false alternatives … until something truly better comes along?

Meanwhile, more than 1.2 billion people still do not have electricity. Another 2 billion have electrical power only sporadically and unpredictably. Hundreds of millions get horribly sick, and five million die every year from lung and intestinal diseases that are due to breathing smoke from open fires … and not having refrigeration, clean water and safe, bacteria-free food.

As Steven Lyazi has noted, these people simply want to take their rightful, God-given places among Earth’s healthy and prosperous people. Instead, they’re being told “that wouldn’t be sustainable.” They’re being told they must be content with a few wind turbines near their villages and little solar panels on their huts – to charge cell phones, pump a little water, power a few light bulbs and operate tiny refrigerators.

Politicized Sustainability is irrational, unjust, inhumane, eco-imperialistic and environmentally destructive. It is especially harmful to the world’s poor. It’s time to rethink and overhaul this insanity.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org), and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death and other books on public policy. 

Brown University President Spouts Progressive Elitist Nonsense -- Once Again

Christina Paxton, President of Brown University, is about to start her second 5-year term in office.  I have just received a letter from her proclaiming the great successes of Brown University.  Here is one such claim to morality and accomplishment:

We are moving forward with plans to address ways in which Brown’s business and investment operations can fully reflect the University’s commitment to environmental sustainability, with an emphasis on addressing climate change. In addition, I will establish a working group to develop new Greenhouse Gas emissions goals that extend beyond Brown’s 2008 commitment, which was to reduce GHG emissions to 42 percent below 2007 levels by 2020. We are well on track to reach our original goal, and it is time to develop ambitious goals for the future that reflect innovations in technology and changes in energy markets that have taken place over the past decade.

Now the climate change predictions due to Greenhouse Gas emissions are based on clearly faulty physics as I have pointed out on this blog over and over.  Many people have pointed out the continuing failure of many of the predictions made by the advocates of catastrophic man-made global warming.  In real science, an hypothesis is known to be wrong when it makes clearly false predictions.  While she claims that Brown has been "making the case for science and evidence-based research" and been engaged in the "tireless advocacy for investment in scientific inquiry at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in the spring", the fundamental role of wrong predictions in the scientific method is unknown to Brown University.  Because of this disregard for the scientific method and for the well-known principles of physics which the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis violates, Brown students are indoctrinated in false science with massively harmful consequences for mankind.  In its pursuit of a false sustainability, Brown University is wasting precious funds, encouraging faculty to misdirect their research efforts, and directing the talents of its students into damaging future careers.

Paxton goes on to say:

I am especially proud of Brown’s role in economic development of Providence and Rhode Island. We are developing new industrial and corporate partnerships with companies that are eager to hire Brown students and collaborate with Brown faculty in areas like data science, biomedical research and engineering. Although Brown’s partnerships with industry extend beyond Rhode Island, we are collaborating with our state and city to attract new businesses to the region. For example, Brown has participated in plans to develop a multi-use “innovation complex” in Providence’s Jewelry District that will house Brown’s School of Professional Studies, the Cambridge Innovation Center and other commercial tenants. Through this and other efforts, we contribute to strengthening our local community at the same time we strengthen Brown.

Because Brown is such an advocate of over-control of the economy by government with a full-blown commitment to the usual anti-business Progressive Elitist agenda which so commonly casts capitalists as villains, Brown has been more effective in creating the very expensive social welfare state and over-regulation that has caused many businesses to leave Rhode Island or at least to make their investments in new facilities outside the state.  The Providence Journal recently reported:

Rhode Island’s slow recovery from the Great Recession is forecast to continue over the next three years, according to the latest economic outlook produced for the New England Economic Partnership.

The state’s unemployment rate is expected to tick down from 5.6 percent in August to 5.3 percent by 2018, but remain the highest in New England. The number of jobs in Rhode Island, and New England, is expected to increase at modest rates over the next few years. However, Rhode Island isn’t expected to match its pre-recession number of jobs until the second half of 2017, according to data to be released Thursday at a conference at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. 

The Providence Journal goes on to report:

Rhode Island’s economic growth is forecast to improve — from “near stagnation” between 2003 and 2008, when the state’s annual average growth rate of its Gross Domestic Product was 0.2 percent, compared with GDP growth of 1.7 percent in New England and 2.2 percent in the United States. But despite improvement, Rhode Island is forecast to trail the region and nation from 2014 to 2018: Rhode Island’s real GDP is forecast to grow at an annualized rate of 1.8 percent; New England, at 2.0 percent; and the United States, at 2.3 percent.

Demographic trends remain “a source of concern,” the report states: “While population has been stagnant, there is evidence that qualified individuals are leaving the state, which reduces the pool of qualified labor.”

Also, the size of Rhode Island’s labor force, roughly the same size over the last three years, is forecast to increase only 0.5 percent per year from 2014 to 2018. 

Median Family Income in Providence is $43,319, compared to a U.S. median family income of $65,443.

President Paxton has been leading Brown for five years, though the Brown University mindset has been what it is for much longer.  The Democrats that the Brown University administration have been so strongly supportive of have controlled the Rhode Island state and city governments without challenge for decades.  Obama, who had the unquestioned support of Brown University, presided in the White House for most of the period in which Rhode Island state GDP grew at a 0.2% annual rate and while its workforce grew at well less than the national rate.  Brown University, with all of the impact it has on opinions in the state of Rhode Island, is responsible for a negative net effect on the economy of the state. Perhaps no state in the union is as much dominated by one university as Rhode Island is by Brown University.  The state is small, there is no other real academic competition, and Brown resides virtually next door to the state government in the state capital.

Brown was becoming the Progressive Elitist indoctrination center it has become while I was a student there in the late 1960s, but it still had rational elements.  The irrational Progressive Elitist viewpoint was strong enough, however, that it kept me in a near constant condition of adversity.  Dealing with that made me stronger and a more determined voice for reason and for individuality, opposing indoctrination and collectivism.  While I won my personal victory, Brown University proceeded to become entirely communitarian with all-controlling government direction, to advocate constant self-sacrifice, and to endorse only the group feelings of identity politics.  Independent and rational thinkers have become Brown's enemies and should find homes in a healthier community than that provided by Brown University.

Contrasting State Cross Border Business Health Compared to a Freedom Index

A recent discussion I was in with other alumni of Case Western Reserve University about the sorry state of Cleveland, which was just recently chosen by Forbes Magazine as the most miserable city in America, caused me to consider some of the effects on Cleveland of being in a state with a bad business climate.  Of course, the city of Cleveland does much to cause its own problems and can be said very reasonably to have a bad influence on the politics of the whole state of Ohio.  This case also caused me to think about the strange underdevelopment of southern New Jersey.  Then today, I read an article on the strong business performance of Northern Virginia compared to Washington, D.C. and the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C.  What explains these differences?

There are major differences in the ability to do business based on regional factors such as location, geography, population density, transportation, and other factors besides political factors.  This makes it hard to fully compare doing business in South Dakota with doing it in New Jersey or Maryland.  But, if one is a business owner or prospective owner, there is often a fair equivalency in many of these other factors if you are deciding whether to establish your business in Northern Virginia or in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C.  Similarly, it is very reasonable to consider putting your business in southeast Pennsylvania, Delaware, or Southern New Jersey.  Once again, one can choose Ohio, or one of Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky, or Pennsylvania for many types of businesses.  Specifically, if one is considering the Cleveland, Ohio area, it is easy also to consider Pennsylvania.

I want to explore how far political freedom can be correlated with these remarkable differences in economic and business performance.  William P. Ruger and Jason Sorens have published Freedom in the 50 States: An Index of Personal and Economic Freedom through the Mercatus Center of George Mason University, dated February 2009, which I previously discussed in a post here.  They rated and ranked the states for economic freedom and then again for personal freedom and provide an overall freedom ranking.  They correlate the degree of freedom with rates of internal net migration.  People, at least those willing to move, find freedom attractive.  Economic growth rates may also be suspected to be dependent upon economic freedom, and at least secondarily upon personal freedom as well.  Start-up companies commonly need to be able to attract bright, hardworking professionals.  It is reasonable to expect that many of them value personal freedom.

Consider the issue of the growth of Northern Virginia versus the Washington suburbs of Maryland.  In 1970, Northern Virginia accounted for 27.0% of the Gross Regional Product, with Suburban Maryland having a 34.5% share, and D.C. a 37.5% share.  In 2009, D.C.'s share had shrunk drastically to 22%, while Suburban Maryland had shrunk slightly to 32%.  Northern Virginia rose startlingly to 46% of the Gross Regional Product.  In absolute terms, all three sub-regions grew their gross product, but clearly the rate of growth in Northern Virginia greatly outstripped that of the Suburban Maryland and D.C. areas.

How did Virginia compare to Maryland in the freedom indices?  Virginia was ranked 13th on the Economic Freedom Index, while Maryland was ranked 34.  Virginia was ranked number 9 on the personal freedom index, while Maryland was ranked 50th.  For overall freedom, Virginia was ranked number 9 and Maryland was ranked number 46.  While other factors can be critical in starting a new business, many businesses will have a fairly balanced choice between Virginia and Maryland for other reasons and will then choose more economic and personal freedom.  D.C. is not ranked, but it is almost certainly worse than Maryland for freedom, so its more greatly fallen share of the Gross Regional Product is surely to be expected.  These freedoms are not just luxuries being chosen.  In many cases, they are the difference between business success and failure.

I have a friend who lives in Southern New Jersey and he has told me many stories of the poverty there, the miserable schools, and the very high local unemployment rates.  This was true prior to the recession.  Of course such a situation can make an area already look unattractive to a business.  But, there is plenty of relatively undeveloped land in Southern New Jersey and locations close to Philadelphia and densely populated Delaware areas.  It is also in the middle of the mid-Atlantic area.  Why is this area so highly undeveloped when Northern New Jersey has a high degree of development?

Well, if we look at Northern New Jersey and compare freedom there to that in New York, we find that New Jersey does relatively well, because New York is miserable.  On the Economic Freedom Index, New Jersey is 46, while New York is 50.  Both are awful, but New Jersey is at least competitive and even better.  On the Personal Freedom Index, New Jersey rates a 45 ranking, while New York is 48.  On the Overall Freedom Index New Jersey is 49 and New York is 50.  So Northern New Jersey can compete for businesses with New York.

But, Southern New Jersey has to compete with Pennsylvania and Delaware for businesses.  One has to expect that the fact that health insurance, as mandated by the respective states, being twice as expensive in New Jersey compared to Pennsylvania, for instance, might have some impact on how businesses will fare in the respective areas.  The Economic Freedom Index takes into account many other factors as well.  Comparing New Jersey to Pennsylvania and Delaware, we find that PA is 19, DE is 24, and NJ is a lowly 46.  On the Personal Freedom Index, PA is 29, DE is 36, and NJ is 45.  The Overall Freedom Index says PA is 20, DE is 26, and again we have our lowly NJ at 49.  The inducement here is clearly to choose Pennsylvania for your new business, or maybe Delaware.  But, Southern New Jersey looks like a hard choice to justify.

Cleveland is not quite so strongly affected by conditions in a state which is really close to it.  But still, many businesses might reasonably say that they have reason to be in the Eastern Mid-West and then choose a state to be in.  This will affect Cleveland.  Of these states, the nearest is Pennsylvania.  But, Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky, and West Virginia also border Ohio.  Let me list the states, their Economic Freedom Index ranking, their Personal Freedom Index ranking, and their Overall Freedom Index ranking:

PA, 19, 29, 20
WV, 40, 17, 33
KY, 33, 26, 32
IN, 16, 19, 13
MI, 15, 20, 14
OH, 32, 46, 38

On Overall Freedom, Ohio is dead last in its local region.  It is particularly poor with respect to Indiana, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.  It is hardly a wonder that Ohio is having a hard time economically.  This, in turn, hurts Cleveland.  To be sure, the fact that it is very hard to start a business in Cleveland is an outstanding reason for it to be a basket case.  John Stossel recently pointed out that a Cleveland official recently boasted that they helped a company set up a business in Cleveland in a mere 18 months.  In comparison, a company was started in Houston in one day.  Cleveland has 22 zoning categories, while Houston has none.  Cleveland has a penchant for electing kooks as mayor.  Dennis Kucinich was one of the worst.  Dennis the Menace is blatantly opposed to the profit motive.  He is now in the House of Representatives and for a long while opposed ObamaCare because it was not a single-payer program.  He caved after a ride with Obama in Air Force One.  [Did Obama threaten to throw him out the door at altitude?  Dennis should have held true to his convictions.]

The Progressives view freedom as the archaic and quaint coin to be paid for the aid of the needy.  Or so they say.  They do have an uncanny penchant for making the politically-connected wealthy much more wealthy and even those who are only politically connected wealthy.  But, history tells us that man's condition was little improved for eons until capitalism and the free market system began its rapid development in the 1800s.  Comparative studies today of the countries around the world show huge advantages in overall prosperity and the prosperity of the poor in nations for those nations with higher degrees of freedom.  The little study above also shows that there is some considerable reason to believe that even the differences between adjacent states in the United States are very important for the economic development of states and regions in those states.

Trading freedom for redistributionist schemes is a fool's errand.  The average wealth and income will fall, as will the median wealth and income, as will the wealth and income of the poor.  No one wins, except those who are consumed by envy and must level everyone to poverty to slake the thirst of that lowly envy.  Frankly, every state should be in a keen competition with the states near it to provide its citizens with more freedom than those neighboring states do.  Of course, the politicians would hate to see such a competition be widely recognized as important by the People.  They do everything they can to avoid letting us know about this, including insisting that the government-run schools not teach students about this source of American Exceptionalism.  We are prosperous because we are free.  As we lose our freedom, we will lose our prosperity.