Perverse, conflicted ethical systems by Paul Driessen

Radical environmentalists put people last, and destroy habitats and wildlife to end fossil fuels

Third Reich Forest Minister Hermann Goering was an avid hiker and ecologist who once sent a man to a concentration camp for cutting up a frog for fish bait. In 1933 he and other Nazi Party leaders enacted anti-vivisection laws to stop what he called “unbearable torture and suffering in animal experiments.”

Intensely hostile to capitalism, the Nazis controlled all industries and envisioned large-scale wind turbine projects that would generate “huge amounts of cheap energy” and create millions of German jobs.

But as Luftwaffe commander, Goering planned and directed the 1939 terror bombing of Warsaw and the final obliteration of the city’s Jewish ghetto. Thousands were slaughtered, and survivors were sent to the Treblinka concentration camp, under “the final solution” that he helped mastermind – to send millions of Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, “mentally deficient burdens” and other “sub-humans” to ovens and mass graves.

About the most charitable thing one can say about Nazi ethics is that they were perversely conflicted and schizophrenic. People clearly occupied a lower niche than animals on their “moral and ethical” hierarchy.

Sadly, the same observations apply to the more rabid elements of modern environmentalism. Ironically, in the name of “keeping fossil fuels in the ground” to “save the planet” from “dangerous manmade climate change” and other imagined calamities, radical greens also demand actions that would ultimately destroy the very habitats and wildlife they claim to love. Their own words underscore their attitudes.

“If we don’t overthrow capitalism, we don’t have a chance of saving the world ecologically.” (Earth First! activist Judy Bari) “Loggers losing their jobs because of spotted owl legislation is no different than people being out of work after the furnaces of Dachau shut down.” (Friends of the Earth founder David Brower)

People have become “a cancer … a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth. Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.” (National Park Service scientist David Graber) “In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, to contribute something to solving overpopulation.” (Prince Philip of England)

“Even if animal research produced a cure for AIDS, we’d be against it.” (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals president Ingrid Newkirk) “Six million people died in concentration camps, but six billion broiler chickens will die this year in slaughterhouses.” (Newkirk again)

Banning DDT in Sri Lanka might well unleash a malaria epidemic, but “so what? People are the cause of all the problems. We have too many of them. We need to get rid of some of them, and this is as good a way as any.” Besides, in the United States, DDT substitutes “only kill farm workers, and most of them are Mexicans and Negroes.” (Environmental Defense Fund scientist Charles Wurster)

“Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.” (Paul Ehrlich, who in 1968 predicted mass starvation and a collapse of civilization by the 1980s)

“It’s much cheaper for everybody in Africa to have electricity where they need it,” from little solar panels “on their huts.” (Actor Ed Begley, Jr.) People in developing countries “simply cannot expect to have the material lifestyle of the average American.” (Friends of the Earth president Brent Blackwelder)

These attitudes, policies and demands prevail today. Radical greens still advance the same irrational, intolerant views about pesticides to control insect-borne diseases; genetically modified crops to feed more people from less acreage with less water; and access to abundant, reliable, affordable energy required to power modern industrialized societies in Africa, Asia and other less developed regions.

The world’s poorest families still live unnecessarily squalid, miserable, diseased, malnourished, short lives. Billions still don’t even have electricity, clean water, light bulbs or a tiny refrigerator.

It’s awful enough that they were born into these places and conditions, and must endure corrupt, kleptocratic dictators. It is intolerable that their hopes and dreams are also stymied by unelected, unaccountable eco-imperialist activists and bureaucrats, who prance, preen and profess their commitment to “marginalized” people – but care about them only if they are “threatened” by capitalism or climate change. Not surprisingly, they brazenly ignore their own callous roles in this injustice.

The world’s dark-skinned people remain at the bottom of the environmentalist ethical hierarchy – with millions dying every year from preventable diseases of poverty, perpetuated by callous environmentalists. Developed country loggers, miners, factory workers, ranchers, pensioners and poor minorities are not much higher up; farmers also get short shrift, unless they grow corn, soybeans or canola for biofuels.

The battle over fossil fuels has recently entered other dangerous territory, as “protesters” launch campaigns reminiscent of radicals putting spikes in trees so that sawmill blades would explode and injure workers – while comrades bombed GMO and animal testing labs, meat packing plants and even houses.

Their targets now are oil and natural gas transport systems – as a prelude to more rampant destruction – as Putin aides and cronies assist and finance other groups that are trying to block US energy production.

A new cadre of Earth Liberation Front anarchists has taken to closing the valves on pipelines – sabotage that could result in pipeline ruptures, oil spills, explosions, injuries and deaths. In one case, the “valve turners” called the Keystone pipeline operations center just minutes before closing the valve, causing the valve wheel and ground below the saboteurs’ feet to shake. They could have caused a disaster.

If caught, arrested and prosecuted, these extremists invoke the “necessity defense” – asserting that they were compelled to break the law, in order to prevent a greater harm: manmade climate cataclysms.

The eco-terror groups have issued a “Decisive Ecological Warfare” manifesto, urging like-minded criminal elements to commit sabotage against pipelines, transmission lines, oil tankers and refineries. As in the past, the militants want “more moderate” environmental groups to support the “necessity” defense, acts of sabotage, and the use of eco-terrorism to “disrupt and dismantle industrial civilization” and “remove the ability of the powerful to exploit the marginalized and destroy the planet.”

They want more “mainstream” pressure groups to promote the notion that sabotage is acceptable and normal where Earth’s future is at stake. Environmentalists have already persuaded Western institutions not to support pesticide use, fossil fuel power plant construction and other modern technologies in poor, disease-ridden, energy-deprived countries – so maybe this lunacy [is] no longer so farfetched.

Several states have passed “critical infrastructure protection” bills, assessing criminal penalties on terrorists and organizations that conspire to trespass on or damage essential infrastructure sites. The bills also hold parties responsible for any resultant damages to property or persons; they should also penalize foundations and other financiers of eco-terror. All 50 states and Congress should enact similar bills.

The asserted justifications that drive perverse, conflicted environmentalist ethics are based on ideologies, assertions and computer models that label humans, capitalism and modern technologies as existential threats to our planet. They have given rise to a $1.5-trillion-per-year Climate Industrial Complex that is determined to expand its revenues and control people’s lives, livelihoods and living standards – while redistributing wealth mostly to those who would be in power and those who would keep them in power, while sending just enough to the world’s poorest families to improve their lives slightly at the margins.

Ironically, in the process, eco-activists will inflict far more damage on environmental values than do the technologies they despise. Their “solutions” to alleged ecological “problems” will turn billions of acres into wind and solar farms, biofuel plantations, hydroelectric projects, and mines for materials needed for wind turbines, solar panels, batteries and other “clean, green, renewable” energy alternatives.

The twentieth century revealed how thin the veneer of humanity, civilization and ethics can be, when propaganda, fear-mongering, hatred and emotions take over. We need to muster enough science, intellectual rigor and freedom of speech to prevent more deaths in the name of “environmental justice.”

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy and environmental policy.

The Obama Economic Growth Record

In the seven years 2009 - 2015 under Obama, the rate of real GDP growth has averaged 1.4% a year. It takes zero increase in productivity to increase the GDP at the rate of growth of the population. Over the six Obama years 2009 - 2014, the population of the USA has decreased from an initial high of 0.98% in 2009 to a 2015 rate of 0.77% as hope has died.  The average population rate over those six Obama years was 0.91%.  The real, per capita GDP growth rate is then about 1.4% - 0.9% = 0.5%. This real, per capita GDP rate is the rate that actually tells us how fast our standard of living is improving.  A 0.5% annual rate is pathetic and the result of a serious national malaise.

Hillary would continue down this sorry path.  That path is looking even worse so far this year.  The 1st quarter real GDP growth rate was just revised downward to 0.8%, while the second quarter rate was reported to be 1.2%.  Subtract the population growth rate to estimate the per capita real GDP growth rate and that rate so far this year is less than the 0.5% of the prior Obama years.  As is the case with Obama, Hillary knows nothing about economics or how to grow a business.  Nonetheless, many Americans will be voting for more of the same in a few months.

Obama is the only President between 1950 and the present to never achieve a 3% real GDP growth rate.  The suppression of high rates of growth following a deep recession is a very great feat, since such high rates are almost invariably the result of the corrections that occur in a recession.  Of course, the Obama administration frustrated many of those corrections in the Great Recession, wasted huge fortunes of money, and enacted extremely expensive and irrational laws and regulations to wreck havoc on the U.S. economy and its businesses.  See:

Let us examine a crucial consequence of adopting the Obama-Hillary new economic growth normal with a government taking huge chunks of the private sector economy under its dictates year after year.  Let us compare the resulting size estimates for real per capita GDP based on a 0.5% Democratic Party rate of growth and a number of rates of growth which could be achieved by more rational economic policies giving us lower tax rates, fewer regulations, no irrational laws, and no violations of the Rule of Law.  Most Americans can expect to live another 40 years.  So let us ask what the size of the economy in terms of the real per capita GDP will be 40 years from now should we forego big government controls for a free and robust private sector economy.

Growth rate of 0.5%, real, per capita GDP in 40 years is 1.22 times the present case on the Obama - Hillary course.

Growth rate of 2.0%, real, per capita GDP in 40 years is 2.21 times the present case, with economic policies marginally less irrational than those of Obama - Hillary.

Growth rate of 3.0%, real, per capita GDP in 40 years is 3.26 times the present case, with economic policies based on a modest level of rationality.

Growth rate of 4.0%, real, per capita GDP in 40 years is 4.80 times the present case with a free market economy.

If we measure the size of the real, per capita GDPs at higher growth rates as ratios to the Obama - Hillary new normal 40-year economy, the economy is much larger.

2.0% growth, the economy is 1.81 times larger.

3.0% growth, the economy is 2.67 times larger

4.0% growth, the economy is 3.93 times larger

Do we really love the big government directed economy of Obama - Hillary so much that we wish to forego an economy in 40 years which is 2, 3, or 4 times wealthier than it is now for one that is only 22% larger than it is now?  We are not just giving up several times more wealth, but we are also giving up all of the extra inventions, the extra funding for science, the extra funding for medical research and its clinical applications, the additional knowledge, the greater national security, improved housing and retirement, and the abundance of interesting and challenging jobs of such robust and diverse economies.  Does the big government model really offer anything to improve our standard of living that begins to compare to what we are giving up by adopting that model of human and economic controls?  It is absolutely inconceivable that the Obama - Hillary 0.5% real per capita GDP growth rate is the rational choice.

This is truly a case of checking out the claims of someone who is claiming to offer you something for nothing. There is clearly an alternative outcome one can choose and that outcome, consistent with liberty, is vastly superior for our personal security and our desire to flourish in life. The freebie is purchased most dearly.  One is reminded of Ayn Rand's frequent refrain that we should ask when offered a packaged deal, "Instead of what?"

Revised State Real GDP Changes in 2013

According to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, the percentage change of real GDP in 2013 was:

Now recall that real GDP is under-corrected for inflation due to the government insistence in leaving such volatile, but clearly more rapidly increasing cost, items such as food and energy are not included in the cost of living index.  Then also recall that one should really be looking at real per capita GDP since that tells us whether our standard of living is actually increasing.  If the GDP increases by less than the rate of growth of the population, then our standard of living actually falls.  The average US population growth rate was 0.9% from 2001 to 2010, so real GDP increases of 0.9% provides a stagnant standard of living.

New York state which is running ads nationally claiming to be the second best job creator state in the nation clearly underperformed in 2013 with a state GDP that grew by a mere 0.7%.  The state of Maryland, whose Governor O'Malley believes himself ready to run for the presidency, had a 0.0% growth rate.  Yes, preventing the growth of one's own state's GDP now qualifies a politician well for the Democrat Party nomination for the presidency!

Most of the high growth states in the US are in the center of the nation.  The Dakotas, the Rocky Mountain states, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas, and West Virginia are the heroic states for those who wish to earn a living.

The Obama Economic Stagnation and Real American Growth

As government takes control over more and more of the wealth of the nation, the economy staggers.  Obama is the quintessential Big Government man who has no appreciation for the fact that our real standard of living is improved not by government, but by private sector enterprises.  But improving most Americans standard of living takes time, and today very many Americans seem to want to benefit from government redistributions that will immediately transfer the wealth created by a minority to a majority less able or willing to create that wealth.  This is a short-sighted aim even for the immediate beneficiary, since redistribution results in the total wealth of the society becoming smaller over time than it would otherwise become.  It is also generally the case that those who think they will benefit from the forced transfer of wealth will fall victim to exaggerated promises and condemn their own children to a much more bleak future.  Others believe that some under-performing or disadvantaged Americans will be better off if forced transfers of wealth occur, but do not think that many such people will be better off over a greater part of their lives if the whole American economy grows healthily than if it does not.

If you are a 30-year-old American today, you are probably going to work until you are 70 years old.  The size of the American economy in 40 years will have a big impact on the quality of your retirement, not to mention many of the years between now and then.  Let us suppose you actually want your children to live in an economy that offers a much higher standard of living than we have now.  The median American mother is now 31 years old, which means that barring changes in that, her children will be having their own children a median 31 years from now.  Let us consider the size of the American economy 31 years from now under various growth rates to see how this newly long generation of 31 years will affect the next generation of children.

Of course we are interested in using real GDP numbers, not the nominal numbers affected by games played upon the money supply.  Unfortunately, the actual numbers reported by the government for real GDP are not fully corrected for inflation, but we will assume future numbers will be truthful.  In addition, in terms of its impact on our standard of living, we must be aware that the U.S. population has been growing by about 1% a year.  Thus, a real GDP growth of 2.0 %, the rate of GDP increase under the last four years under Obama, is really only a real per capita GDP of 1.0 %.  Note also that when America had much less government, it was able to sustain long-term real growth rates of 5 and 6%.  The following plot shows how the real, per capita size of an economy will grow over a generation of 31 years assuming a continued population growth rate of 1% a year.

So, assuming that the 2.0% growth rate under Obama is continued for 31 years, as one expects given his anti-business policies, the real per capita GDP will only be 36.1% larger then than now.  How incredibly disappointing that will be!  On the other hand, were the government to shrink considerably, we might easily average a real GDP growth rate of 5% a year and the real per capita GDP would be 3.373 times its present size in 31 years.  The Obama economy is easy to imagine and little different than the present economy.  The small government per capita economy would be two full U.S. present economies larger than the Obama economy and such a robust and innovative economy is really very difficult to imagine.  But, such an economy will make almost every American much, much richer and much, much more secure than we are now.  Such an economy is worlds better than the Obama economy in terms of our standard of living.

Note that each additional percent of real GDP growth makes more and more difference to the future economy.  This curve has a strong upward bend, so any act of the government that makes it harder for businesses to grow takes a great deal away from our future.  If government regulations and new mandates by law make it harder for a company to even manage to match its last years income, we all pay for this in the long run.  And no, I am not talking about when we will be dead.  I am talking about long before recent college graduates will retire and the entire lives of their children.

One really needs to think about it when the EPA says that generating a bit more CO2 than they want us to will just conceivably cause a fraction of a degree higher temperature in 87 years so we should give up one or two percent of future GDP growth for this reason.  The damage of doing that to all of us is certainly much greater than any damage to the environment.  Indeed, I have shown over and over that the science used to make these claims is bad and the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis is simply wrong.

Or take the wild claims of the EPA that mercury produced by coal-fired power plants has significant health consequences, so we should pay higher electricity costs to replace those power plants with much more expensive and unreliable power plants with their own environmental problems.  This EPA ruling also has important consequences for the growth rates of our economy.

We need to remember that every new paperwork requirement put on businesses also takes resources that they could otherwise be using to improve their products and services or their marketing efforts in a world market.  Businesses suffer greatly from the thousands of little cuts that unthinking state and federal legislators and state and federal bureaucrats just love to make, of course while acting as though they are saving the average American from some harm.

In fact, most of this is pretense.  Almost every business wants to improve the lives of its customers.  That is how they make money.  At least the majority who have no special favors from government do.  Yes, there are some state-regulated monopolies who are less well-behaved and there are crony mercantile companies such as Obama's green energy companies who are simply trying to take advantage of us.  But, these are companies corrupted by Big Government and eliminating it will also eliminate companies that no longer care to bring in customers on a voluntary basis for each others mutual benefit.

Krugman Claims Europe is Economically Successful, Proving Socialism Works

Paul Krugman says:

Europe is an economic success, and that success shows that social democracy works.

Since 1980 -- when our politics took a sharp turn to the right, while Europe's didn't -- America's real G.D.P. has grown, on average, 3 percent per year.  Meanwhile, the E.U. 15 -- the bloc of 15 countries that were members of the European Union before it was enlarged to include a number of former Communist nations -- has grown only 2.2 percent a year.  America rules!

Or maybe not.  All this really says is that we've had faster population growth.  Since 1980, per capita real G.D.P. -- which is what matters for living standards -- has risen about the same rate in America and in the E.U. 15:  1.95 percent a year here; 1.83 percent there.

Seems interesting and perhaps surprising, but wait.  Think about it.

First off, in 1981, not 1980, we stopped moving deeper into socialism, but we did almost nothing to reverse it.  In 1988, we restarted our momentum down the socialist path under the first President Bush with President Clinton and then the second President Bush continuing the slide into the numbing clutches of socialism.  We now have the highest corporate tax in the world, excepting Japan whose corporate tax will be lower than ours starting in 2011.  Meanwhile, many of the European countries have been reducing their corporate taxes and many other business taxes.  Some have adopted flat rate income taxes with growth rates increasing as a result.  Many of the nations have returned state-run enterprises to the private sector.  Yes, there are many legacies of socialism in Europe and yes, they are still enamored of it in many ways.  At the same time, they have come to understand that there are economic penalties associated with it and they have backed off from socialism somewhat. The effects of the long term legacy of socialism are stronger in the comparison between the U.S. and Europe than have been the effects only compared in the window since 1980 as Krugman does.

There are other problems in the comparison.  One is that our population growth is not just a variable in need of correction.  It is due to Americans having a more positive view of the future, which the socialist environment seems to kill off.  This makes it more tempting to have children.  It is also due to the fact that we allow very high levels of immigration to the U.S. and many of our immigrants are very poor as they begin their life here.  Many take years to learn the skills that native Americans have.  But, let us leave this caveat aside and look at the more meaningful per capita GDP numbers corrected for Purchasing Power Parity (PPP).  This information is available at a Blog called Political Calculations in a post entitled Battle of the Titans: U.S. vs E.U. GDP per Capita, 2008.

We find there that:

United States 2008 GDP-PPP is $45,588.10

European Union 2008 GDP-PPP is $31,182.49

The U.S. beats the complete E.U. by miles and miles, or more than 46%!  But this is not what Krugman was comparing.  He left out the newer members of the E.U. to exclude those most hurt by their prior experience with socialism.  So let us look at the results on a country by country and a state by state basis while ordering them together, with the E.U. countries in red (note that Norway and Switzerland are not E.U. countries) in the table at the end of this article.

Luxembourg does well and beats the U.S. average, but it comes in behind the District of Columbia and has a bit less than half the GDP-PPP of D.C. and it has a smaller population, so it does not raise the E.U. result relative to the U.S.  The next country on the list is Ireland, which comes in just behind the U.S. average of $45,588.10 with $45,475.12.  Then the Netherlands and Austria manage to beat 16 states.  Sweden, which has made a strong reversal of its socialist model lately, beats out the nine poorest U.S. states, but loses to the Okies!  The United Kingdom only beats seven states, finishing behind Montana.  Germany beats only five states and loses to Alabama.  France and Italy can only beat Mississippi!  None of the other countries of the E.U. can beat any state of the U.S.

So despite the fact that many of the European countries have been backing away from socialism and the U.S. has been moving deeper into its clutches, the standard of living in the U.S. is clearly much higher than that of Europeans with their long history of embracing socialism, even gussied up as social democracy.  The upcoming election should slow down our present slid deeper into the quagmire of socialism.  As the table below makes clear, you have to weigh a horror of seeing anyone around you who is better off materially than you are very heavily to find any reason to think socialism will give you a higher standard of living.  I do not believe any thinking Americans really want to trade places with European countries on this list and we should be able to agree that the Paul Krugman claim is false.