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. 

Revisiting wind turbine impacts by Paul Driessen

Erroneous recent calculation highlights need to assess renewable energy sustainability claims

It’s amazing, though hardly surprising, how quickly some used Hurricane Harvey’s devastation to claim that fossil fuel emissions are driving catastrophic climate change and weather. Their proffered solution, of course, is to replace those fuels with “clean, sustainable, renewable” energy.

I’ve criticized this supposed solution many times, on multiple grounds. Unfortunately, a hasty numerical calculation for a recent column was way off base, and readers properly chastised me for the error. I just blew it, using megawatts instead of megawatt-hours to derive the number of wind turbines … and amount of land … it would take to replace the world’s 2016 electricity entirely with wind energy.

My conclusion that it would require 830 million turbines and twice the land area of North America was thus off by embarrassing amounts. However, my reviewers offered many “correct” numbers.

Their turbine totals ranged from 2 million to 4, 10 and 12 million; their acreage figures from 0.5 to 40, 60 and even 247 per turbine. Total acreage for all the turbines ranged from the size of France or Texas – to half of North America. Energy scholar Cork Hayden graciously provided analytical aid.

Bottom line: Assumptions are key – about turbine size; number, location and extent of good wind sites; ability to actually erect turbines on those sites; wind turbine capacity factor, in average hours per day of electricity generation; duration and quality of wind power per year, especially as turbines proliferate into increasingly poor wind areas; and power generation needed to charge huge battery arrays to ensure reliable electricity during multiple windless days (2, 7, 14 or more) when turbines provide no power.

Another variable, of course, is the amount of electricity that is to be replaced by wind. In 2016, the world used 25 billion megawatt-hours (MWh) of electrical energy, generated by fossil fuel, hydroelectric and nuclear power stations, with minor contributions from wood (biomass) and trivial amounts of wind and solar. Year-round average power generation was 2.85 million megawatts (MW) or 2.85 terawatts (TW) – compared to zero generation in 1881.

Electricity makes our industries, jobs, travel, communication, living standards, health and safety possible, and demand will certainly grow as more nations electrify, and more vehicles are battery-powered. 

Here are my fundamental assumptions: Wind turbines replace 100% of today’s 2.85 TW global electricity generation, by some future date – as many activists and politicians insist we must (and can) do. Turbines are all 1.8-MW nameplate power. Average turbine capacity factor gradually falls from 33% to 16.5% as the best wind sites are utilized, and much poorer sites must be developed.

(In the USA many of the best wind sites are off the Washington-to-California and Maine-to-Georgia coastlines, and in the Great Lakes, where water depths and powerful local opposition would make it impossible to install many turbines. Onshore turbine size is limited by the size of blades that can be hauled by trucks on winding roads. The same situation would likely apply around most of the globe.)

Further assumptions: One-third of turbine output powers society; two-thirds charge batteries that provide power for 48 of every 72 hours that wind is not blowing. And winds always cooperate with that scheme – always arriving just in the nick of time, as batteries are depleted, and never disappearing for more than two days, even during sweltering summers or frigid winters when demand soars but winds disappear.

Of course, most of these assumptions exist only in the realm of fairies, pixie dust, green energy utopia and easy number crunching. They are meant to initiate important analyses and debates that climate alarmists, renewable energy proponents, legislators and policy makers have never conducted.

Using these assumptions, generating 25 billion megawatt-hours would require 1.6 million 1.8-MW turbines functioning at full 1.8-MW capacity in strong winds, all day, every day, with no worries about storage. If they operate only eight hours a day (33% engineered capacity), we just use electricity when it’s available, instead of when we need it. But that’s terribly inconvenient and disruptive.

So we employ the Dr. Hayden system, instead. We erect 4.8 million turbines that operate steadily for eight hours, sending one-third of their electricity to the grid and two-thirds to batteries. That would yield 8 hours of direct power while the wind is blowing (33% capacity factor) – and let us draw power from the batteries for the next 16 hours, until the wind regularly picks up again. “I love magic,” he says.

That clearly won’t work. We really need at least 48 hours of storage – and thus three times as many turbines, under a similar arrangement, but providing more flexibility, to recognize unpredictable wind patterns and the likelihood of two windless days in a row. We’re up to 14.4 million 1.8-MW turbines.

Want a bigger safety net? To assure against seven windless days? 50 million turbines should do it.

But then we’re really into the mediocre wind sites. Capacity plummets to 16.5% or so. Perhaps 100 million turbines will do the trick. Pray that lulls last no more than a week. Or send the army to those intransigent, unpatriotic coastal communities, and forcibly install turbines in their super windy areas.

That would also ensure that electricity generation is close to our big urban centers – hence shorter transmission lines, and less cement, steel, copper, et cetera to build the power lines. It’s a win-win situation, except for those who have to look at or live next to turbines and transmission lines, of course.

How much land are we talking about, to generate 25 billion megawatt-hours of global annual electricity? Assuming top quality wind sites, at 5 kilowatts per acre (average output per land area for any turbine at the windiest locations), onshore turbines operating 24/7/365 would require some 570 million acres.

That’s 25% of the United States – or 30% of the Lower 48 US states. It’s almost all the land in Washington, Oregon, California, Idaho, Nevada, Montana, Wyoming, Utah and Arizona combined!

Change the assumptions – change the numbers. To store electricity for windless days, total power generation (and thus turbine numbers and land acreage) begins to skyrocket. For 48 hours of backup, triple the power generation; that’s the entire Lower 48. For a full week of backup, add in Canada.

Let’s not forget the transmission lines and batteries. They also need land (and raw materials).

How many batteries? Storing 1 gigawatt-hour (GWh) of electricity – to provide power for 48 windless hours for a US city of 700,000 people – would require 480,000 of Tesla’s new 100-kWh lithium-ion battery packs. Backing up 2.85 TW for just two windless days would require 1.4 trillion Tesla units! And this assumes the batteries are charged and discharged with 100% efficiency.

Just imagine the land, raw materials, mining, manufacturing and energy that would be needed to make all those batteries (and replace them every few years). As energy and technology analyst Mark Mills has noted, all the world’s existing lithium battery factories combined manufacture only a tiny fraction of that.

I’m sure the world’s battery makers would be more than happy to take our hard-earned taxpayer and consumer cash to build more factories and make all those batteries – to save us from dangerous climate change that is no longer governed by the sun and other powerful natural forces.

Let’s get real. It’s time to stop playing with pixie dust and renewable energy utopia schemes. Time to open our schools and legislatures to actual thinking about energy, sustainability, climate change and what makes our jobs, health and living standards possible. Time for full-bore studies and legislative hearings on all these issues – in the USA, UK, EU and everywhere else.

Sustainability and renewable energy claims are too grounded in ideology, magic and politics. Wind and solar energy forecasts ignore the need to find and mine vast new metal and mineral deposits – and open US lands that are now off limits, unless we want to import all our wind turbines, solar panels and batteries. They assume land use impacts don’t really exist if they are in other people’s backyards.

Worse, too often anyone trying to raise these inconvenient truths is shouted down, silenced, ignored. That has to stop. The stakes are too high for ideology and pixie dust to drive fundamental public policies.

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 the environment.

Comments by Charles:  

Howard "Cork" Hayden, Prof. Emeritus of Physics, University of Connecticut, is the publisher of The Energy Advocate, a monthly newsletter promoting energy and technology published in Pueblo, CO. I have a subscription to this valuable newsletter.

One has to conclude that wind power is not really sustainable power.  Neither is solar power for similar reasons.  What many anti-fossil fuel and anti-nuclear power factions want is that most people, usually not including themselves, will use much less power.  Wind and solar and other non-market power sources are advanced simply for the reason that they will increase the cost of power and decrease the convenience of its use.  This is a means of rationing power and is especially effective to ration its use by lower income people.  The false hypothesis of catastrophic man-made global warming is used as a ruse to justify this energy rationing.

I searched for images of wind farms and easily found many images made with great artistry to make the images beautiful.  Here is a more prosaic image of a wind farm in West Virginia where critics of coal love to bemoan the damage coal mining does to the countryside.  In their minds wind farms do no such damage until someone proposes putting such a wind farm in their neighborhood.

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.

My Reply to "Sustainability is an Economic Boon Not a Liability"

Richard Matthews posted Sustainability is an Economic Boon Not a Liability at the Green Market Oracle.  Here is my comment in response:

There is no scientific consensus that the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis is correct. Most scientists who do say they believe in catastrophic man-made global warming cannot offer a clear explanation of the scientific theory that claim is based on.  Those who offer a theory very often disagree with one another.  Then there are many scientists who see the hypothesis as false, though many of them believe that carbon dioxide does cause some warming, which may be regarded as beneficial, not catastrophic.  Then there are still other scientists, including myself, who understand that the effects of carbon dioxide on the surface temperature are many, all of them very small, and more of them cooling effects than warming effects.  The net result is that CO2 has an insignificant effect. This is why the effect of CO2 has not been measurable to date.

There are many benefits to conserving energy.  Those real benefits are best achieved by people individually choosing them, not by government mandates and subsidies.  Real benefits will be pursued in the free market.  It is only harmful energy policies that need to be imposed by government.

The EPA ruling that CO2 is a pollutant is scientifically unsupported.  Its claims that mercury emitted by coal-fired power plants was a real danger were also without scientific justification.  Years of mercury precipitation data have failed to show any downwind mercury pollution from coal-fired power plants that can be seen above the dominant natural sources of mercury in the USA.  If mercury is such a hazard, there are huge swathes of land in the southern American West and Great Plains states that have to be evacuated due to natural sources of mercury.  Yet even in those areas of relatively high natural mercury contamination in the USA, there is no epidemiological evidence of harm to people.

The last sentence in blue was not in the original comment.

The hidden agendas of sustainability illusions by Paul Driessen

Absurd, impractical sustainability precepts are actually a prescription for government control

As President Trump downgrades the relevance of Obama era climate change and anti-fossil fuel policies, many environmentalists are directing attention to “sustainable development.”

Like “dangerous manmade climate change,” sustainability reflects poor understanding of basic energy, economic, resource extraction and manufacturing principles – and a tendency to emphasize tautologies and theoretical models as an alternative to readily observable evidence in the Real World. It also involves well-intended but ill-informed people being led by ill-intended but well-informed activists who use the concept to gain greater government control over people’s lives, livelihoods and living standards.

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. Sustainability thus reflects the assertion that we are rapidly depleting finite resources, and must reduce current needs and wants so as to save raw materials for future generations.

At first blush, it sounds logical and even ethical. But it requires impossible clairvoyance.

In 1887, when the Hearthstone House became the world’s first home lit via hydroelectric power, no one did or could foresee that electricity would dominate, enhance and safeguard our lives in the myriad ways it does today. Decades later, no one anticipated pure silica fiber optic cables replacing copper wires.

No one predicted tiny cellular phones with superb digital cameras and more computing power than a 1990 desktop computer or 3-D printing or thousands of wind turbines across our fruited plains – or cadmium, rare earth metals and other raw materials suddenly required to manufacture these technological wonders.

Mankind advanced at a snail’s pace for thousands of years. As the modern fossil-fuel industrial era found its footing, progress picked up at an increasingly breathtaking pace. Today, change is exponential. 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 on. We did it because we innovated – invented something better, more efficient or practical. Each advance required different raw materials. 

Who today can foresee what technologies future generations will have 25, 50 or 200 years from now? What raw materials they will need? How we are supposed to ensure that those families meet their needs?

Why then would we even think of empowering government to regulate today’s activities today based on the wholly unpredictable technologies, lifestyles, needs, and resource demands of distant generations? Why would we ignore or compromise the needs of current generations, to meet those totally unpredictable future needs – including the needs of today’s most impoverished, energy-deprived, malnourished people, who desperately want to improve their lives?

Moreover, we are not going to run out of resources anytime soon. A 1-kilometer fiber optic cable made from 45 pounds of silica (Silicon is the Earth’s most abundant element in the crust [CRA additions]) carries thousands of times more information than an equally long RG-6 cable made from 3,600 pounds of copper, reducing demand for copper.

In 1947, the world’s proven oil reserves totaled 47 billion barrels. Over the next 70 years, we consumed hundreds of billions of barrels – and yet, in 2016 we still had at least 2,800 billion barrels of oil reserves, including oil sands, oil shales and other unconventional deposits: at least a century’s worth, plus abundant natural gas. Constantly improving technologies now let us find and produce oil and natural gas from deposits that we could not even detect, much less tap into, just a couple decades ago.

Sustainability dogma also revolves around hatred of fossil fuels, and a determination to rid the world of them, regardless of any social, economic or environmental costs of doing so. And we frequently find that supposedly green, eco-friendly and sustainable alternatives are frequently anything but.

U.S. ethanol quotas eat up 40% of the nation’s corn, cropland the size of Iowa, 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 and gets one-third less mileage per gallon than gasoline.

Heavily subsidized wind energy requires standby fossil fuel generators, ultra-long transmission lines and thus millions of tons of concrete, steel, copper, rare earth metals and fiberglass. The turbines create chronic health problems for people living near them and kill millions of birds and bats – to produce intermittent, wholly unreliable electricity that costs up to 250% more than coal-based electricity.

For all that, on a torrid August 2012 day, Great Britain’s 3,500 giant wind turbines generated a mere 12 megawatts of electricity: 0.032% of the 38,000 MW the country was using at the time.

The United Kingdom also subsidizes several huge anaerobic digesters, intended to convert animal manure and other farm waste into eco-friendly methane for use in generating electricity. But there is insufficient farm waste. So the digesters are fed with corn (maize), grass and rye grown on 130,000 acres (four times the size of Washington, DC), using enormous amounts of water, fertilizer – and of course diesel fuel to grow, harvest and transport the crops to the digesters. Why not just drill and frack for natural gas?

That brings us to the political arena, where the terminology is circular, malleable, infinitely elastic, the perfect tool for activists. Whatever they support is sustainable; whatever they oppose is unsustainable; and whatever mantras or protective measures they propose give them more power and control.

The Club of Rome sought to build a new movement by creating “a common enemy against whom we can unite” – allegedly looming disasters “caused by human intervention in natural processes” and requiring “changed attitudes and behavior” to avoid global calamities: global warming and resource depletion.

“Building an environmentally sustainable future requires restricting the global economy, dramatically changing human reproductive behavior, and altering values and lifestyles,” said Worldwatch Institute founder Lester Brown. “Doing this quickly requires nothing short of a revolution.”

“Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class – involving high meat intake, the use of fossil fuels, electrical appliances, home and workplace air conditioning, and suburban housing – are not sustainable,” Canadian arch-environmentalist Maurice Strong declared.

“Minor shifts in policy, moderate improvements in laws and regulations, rhetoric offered in lieu of genuine change,” former Vice President Al Gore asserted – “these are all forms of appeasement, designed to satisfy the public’s desire to believe that sacrifice, struggle and a wrenching transformation of society will not be necessary.” Environmental activist Daniel Sitarz agreed, saying: “Agenda 21 proposes an array of actions intended to be implemented by every person on Earth. Effective execution of Agenda 21 will require a profound reorientation of all humans, unlike anything the world has ever experienced.”

“Sustainable development,” the National Research Council declaimed in a 2011 report, “raises questions that are not fully or directly addressed in U.S. law or policy, including how to define and control unsustainable patterns of production and consumption, and how to encourage the development of sustainable communities, biodiversity protection, clean energy, environmentally sustainable economic development, and climate change controls.” In fact, said Obama science advisor John Holdren, we cannot even talk about sustainability without talking about politics, power, and control. Especially control.

Of course, the activists, politicians and regulators feel little pain, as they enjoy salaries and perks paid by taxpayers and foundations, fly to UN and other conferences at posh 5-star resorts around the world, and implement agendas that control, redesign and transform other people’s lives.

It is We the Governed – especially working class and poor citizens – who pay the price, with the world’s poorest families paying the highest price. We can only hope the Trump Administration and Congress will dismantle and defund sustainable development, thealter ego of cataclysmic manmade climate change.

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

Environmentalist Insurance Policies by Paul Driessen

Environmentalist insurance policies

Intellectual ammo for holiday party responses to claims that you need meteorite insurance

Paul Driessen

Many liberals went into denial, outrage and riot mode after November 8. Now they’re having meltdown over President-Elect Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees with climate and environmental responsibilities:

Former Texas Governor Rick Perry at Energy, Oklahoma AG Scott Pruitt for EPA, Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions for Attorney General, ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson at State, Montana Congressman Ryan Zinke at Interior. As Department of Agriculture secretary and multiple assistant, deputy assistant and other senior level positions are filled, the meltdown will likely raise sea levels by several feet.

It’s even worse than “white supremacists” and “Russian hackers” rigging and stealing the election. Having these people at the helm will be an “existential threat to the planet,” say meltdowners.

A typical over-the-top reaction came from an aptly named spokesperson for radical pressure groups and five-alarm climate scientists that feed at the trough of taxpayer and tax-exempt foundation funding “This is the wealthiest, most corporate, most climate-denying cabinet in history,” snorted Kiernan Suckling, director of the anti-development Center for Biological Diversity.

After eight years of anti-fossil-fuel, anti-growth, anti-job, anti-blue-collar policies – and the Left’s fervent wish for eight more years under Hillary Clinton – any Trumpian shift is bound to look that way to them.

So we’re likely to get a bellyful of bombast from like-minded (or ill-informed) office and neighborhood partygoers, especially if they’re too much imbued with holiday spirits. At the risk of offending those who do not share an NRA perspective on gun control (stance, grip, sight alignment, trigger control), here’s a little intellectual ammunition that conservatives may find helpful during those “spirited” discussions.

The United States needs to reduce taxes and regulations that have hobbled energy development and job creation – threatening to put federal bureaucrats firmly in control of our states, communities, livelihoods and living standards. However, as I noted recently, these essential, long overdue changes will come with no reduction in air, water or overall environmental quality standards that ensure our health and welfare. They will address rogue agency actions that actually impair our living standards, health and wellbeing.

Indeed, nearly all these autocratic government actions are based on some variation of the infamous “precautionary principle.” This infinitely malleable pseudo-guideline says chemicals and other technologies should be restricted or banned if there is any possibility (or accusation by radical activists) that they could be harmful, even if no cause-effect link can be proven.

Even worse, the bogus principle looks only at often-inflated risks from using chemicals, energy systems or other technologies that activists or regulators dislike – never at the risks of not using them; never at risks that could be reduced or eliminated by using them. Sustainability “guidelines” are very similar.

Just as perversely, if the Powers that Wannabe like a technology, they ignore or actively suppress any harmful impacts. For instance, since wind turbines can supposedly replace fossil fuels, they ignore bird and bat deaths, human health damage from infrasound, and the fact that essential metals are mined and processed under horrendous conditions by men, women and children in African and Asian countries.

Those environmental, health, human rights, and child labor violations are far away (literally not in their backyards), and thus can be conveniently ignored.

So can the poverty, disease, malnutrition and early death perpetrated and perpetuated by extremist groups that campaign tirelessly to shut down industries in developed nation communities – and prevent the poorest nations on Earth from gaining access to modern technologies that improve and save lives.

Eco-extremists claim they can save lives by preventing higher temperatures, rising seas, and more storms, droughts and crop failures due to “dangerous manmade climate change” decades from now. So they block fossil fuel power plants that provide reliable, affordable energy for modern homes, hospitals, schools and factories that improve health and living standards – and end up killing millions right now, year after year.

Climate change has been real throughout history. Sometimes beneficial (moderately warm, with ample rainfall), sometimes destructive (decades-long droughts or cold spells, glacial epochs with mile-thick ice sheets crushing entire continents), it is driven by solar, cosmic ray, oceanic and other powerful natural forces that humans cannot control. Carbon dioxide may play a role, but only a minor one, and rising atmospheric CO2 levels make crops, grasslands and forests grow faster and better.

The “unprecedented” manmade climate cataclysms that Al Gore and Barack Obama promised are not happening. For example, we were supposed to get more frequent, powerful and destructive storms; instead, a record 11 years have passed without one category 3-5 hurricane making landfall in the USA. 

To attack fracking and natural gas use, bureaucrats claim methane is 86 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas – but won’t admit that it is 1/235th as prevalent in Earth’s atmosphere (0.00017%), and at least 1/600,000th as prevalent as water vapor (1-4%), the most important GHG.

Their “social cost of carbon” schemes assign ever-higher monetary impacts to every climate and weather problem they can possibly attribute to using carbon-based fuels – but totally ignore the enormous and undeniable benefits of utilizing oil, natural gas and coal that still provide 82% of US and global energy.

They’re convinced their anti-energy diktats will “save the planet,” by shutting down US power plants and factories, despite vastly greater emissions from China, India and a hundred other nations that are rapidly expanding their fossil fuel use, to lift billions more people out of abject poverty, disease and malnutrition.

The same anti-technology activists and bureaucrats also detest biotechnology and genetically modified crops that require less water and can battle insect predators with a tiny fraction of the insecticides required for conventional grains and vegetables. They equally despise another GM marvel, Golden Rice, which prevents Vitamin A Deficiency that blinds and kills hundreds of thousands of children every year.

Instead of applauding the reduced blindness, malnutrition, starvation and death these crops can bring, precautionary and sustainability extremists obsess about imaginary risks of eating them, allowing more millions to die unnecessarily, year after year. It’s not their kids, after all. Why should they be concerned?

The same callous, phony ethics prevail on the disease front. Eco-activists support bed nets – but not insecticide spraying to kill malaria-carrying mosquitoes, and certainly not DDT, the most powerful, longest-lasting mosquito repellant ever invented. Sprayed once every six months on the walls of mud or cinderblock houses, DDT keeps 80% of mosquitoes from entering, irritates those that do come in, so they don’t bite, and kills any that land. 

But radical ideologues focus on trivial, irrelevant side effects that “some researchers say could be linked” to DDT use – and let 600,000 parents and children die excruciating deaths every year from malaria.

Every one of these anti-technology, “precautionary” attitudes is the environmentalist equivalent of protecting American kids from powerful chemicals, fatigue, nausea, hair loss, and increased risk of illness and infection – by banning chemotherapy drugs, and just letting the little cancer patients die.

They are the equivalent of requiring you to carry a $10,000-a-year insurance policy that covers you only if you are killed by a meteorite – or by a raptor or tyrannosaur. At least meteorite risks are real, if extremely remote.

Raptors and T rexes exist only in our imaginations, special effects computers and movie theaters – much like the manmade climate chaos and other precautionary extremism that come from computer models and PR hype, and drive too many of our policies, laws and regulations.

Have fun at your holiday parties. This season promises to be even more animated than most.

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 the environment.

Brown University Dorms Do It In the Dark

This is the sixth March that Brown University dorms are having a Do it in the Dark competition to reduce energy use.  Actually, it is to reduce electricity use in particular.  They are not doing this to save the university money, so it can lower its tuition.  No, they are doing this to Save the Earth!  The administration is telling the students, mostly eager to hear the message, that this is "a time when there is a growing concern about the environmental impact of traditional energy sources."  Never mind the obvious fact that this is a time of lessening concern about the environmental impact of traditional energy sources as much more clean-burning natural gas is available.

Erin Donnellan, a student academic engagement coordinator in the Office of Energy and Environment says "the competition will, in part, lead to more sustainable living for students."  Christopher Powell, assistant vice president for sustainable energy and environmental initiatives, says “I believe this experience really is an attempt to drive home the message that we can all contribute to the global warming dilemma through individual actions.” I wonder what effect their salaries have on the cost of tuition at Brown and what they add to the learning experience at Brown?

To save energy in prior years during the March competition, students have turned off the lights and limited their showers.  Now what idiot does not turn off the lights on leaving a room just to save money?  But at Brown perhaps they turn off the lights while in a room in March so they have a reason not to study.  Now that is really compatible with the reason they went to Brown!  Not taking showers?  I remember when that was the rage among Pembrokers in the late 1960s.  You do not want to be in the same classroom with a bunch of unbathed students.  Besides, does Brown use electricity to heat water, or do they use the usually more efficient natural gas heating of water?

The draconian anti-free speech code of Brown apparently offers no protections to the feelings of those who understand that catastrophic man-made global warming is a falsified hypothesis, or that people stink when they do not shower, or that the EPA just makes up its claims that the mercury output of coal-fired power plants is significant to human health.  No the herd at Brown just eats up the propaganda of the Progressive Elitists and questions nothing.

As a physics graduate from Brown let me tell you dorm competitors how to win this reduction in electricity competition:  Use a lot more energy in your dorm the other months of the year so you can show a great decrease without lowering your standard of living and negatively impacting your learning during the month of March.  Whatever you do, remember that your family is paying a fortune for you to get your Brown education and try to learn as much as you can in March.  No, do not just memorize the propaganda.  Actually apply your rational faculty to the critical evaluation of ideas and to the accuracy of your observations so your family will get their monies worth from a Brown "education."  Too bad Brown does not push sustainability and efficacy in education!

Sustainability on Campus

In a publication called Academic Sourcebook, the lead article of the June 2008 issue is entitled "Sustainability on Campus" by Skip Derra of Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ. It describes a program in sustainability at Arizona State University. He begins with "One convert at a time is a noble goal for any altruistic endeavor, especially sustainability, which has long laid low in the grassroots of society." Convert, noble goal, altruistic endeavor, grassroots of society are words and phrases ringing of religious zeal and selfless, underdog struggle for the sake of society at the expense of self, following paths well pioneered by many religions and all forms of socialism.

ASU's president Michael Crow has made sustainability a university-wide priority. He also was much involved in creating the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment. This is a man with a deep commitment to the politically correct worldview. So, ASU has the first freestanding, degree-granting School of Sustainability in the United States. Jonathan Fink, director of the Global Institute of Sustainability and ASU's sustainability officer says that "We work with government agencies to make sure the problems we are working on are the ones that actually will have an impact." Yes, this is a good strategy to be close to the sources of government funding and stroking the egos of the bureaucrats in them. It is also an admission that the universities are not able to discern the important problems and must turn to government, which has a long track record of not being able to prioritize problems of any sort or of providing practical solutions to those it tackles. This is the blind leading the blind, big time.

So, ASU is providing free bus passes to all faculty, staff, and students in the name of sustainability. Sounds like a nice perk. They are renting cars on a Flexcar program to encourage alternative methods of commuting. I have no idea how that saves energy, though possibly it does reduce the need for parking lots, providing the Flexcars are used enough. They have a program requiring the purchase of recycled products, though many recycled products cost more energy to produce than the original manufacture did and others offer reduced product specifications, such as recycled paper products. They have a commitment to solar energy and have a goal to provide 15% of their 4 to 7 MW of power from solar energy. I am not sure whether the 4 to 7 MW range means that they are unsure of their energy usage, unsure how much energy they will be using when they achieve their 15% goal, or this is an annual rate projected from their winter usage versus their summer usage. They are also growing some of their food on campus, planting citrus, date, and nut trees. They are also growing herbs. A picture shows a narrow strip of garden plowed next to a building. It is hard to imagine that the farming of this narrow strip will reach the efficiency of a farmer managing his agro-business. But, it may educate students to recognize a few of the plants whose fruits they eat, at least.

They do talk about the need to conserve water on the desert campus. Certainly if people are going to insist on living in human inhospitable areas such as the Arizona deserts in large numbers, they have some real sustainability problems. Learning ways to economically conserve energy is also a good thing. Finding ways to recycle products that actually make sense economically, such as recycling aluminum cans, makes good sense. But, sense on university campuses is in short supply. These programs of study would make more sense if they were coupled with close interactions with businesses other than those seeking subsidies from the government for sustainability programs.

There is a sidebar describing programs in sustainability at Stanford University, at Rochester Institute of Technology, at Portland State University, and at Berea College in Kentucky. Rochester Institute of Technology is the university at which my youngest daughter Katie is entering her senior year in a biotechnology degree program. The Galisano Institute for Sustainability there focuses on research and education in sustainable design, pollution prevention, remanufacturing, and alternative energy development. Such a program may have merit, if it is carried out as a matter of rational investigation and education, rather than as the all too popular religious and socialist crusade.