The Green Scare Problem

My Wall Street Journal column on how green scares
have led to counterproductive actions:

‘We’ve heard these same stale arguments before,” said President
Obama in his speech on climate change
last week, referring to those who worry that the Environmental
Protection Agency’s carbon-reduction plan may do more harm than
good. The trouble is, we’ve heard his stale argument before, too:
that we’re doomed if we don’t do what the environmental pressure
groups tell us, and saved if we do. And it has frequently turned
out to be really bad advice.

Making dire predictions is what environmental groups do for a
living, and it’s a competitive market, so they exaggerate.
Virtually every environmental threat of the past few decades has
been greatly exaggerated at some point. Pesticides were not causing
a cancer epidemic, as Rachel Carson claimed in her
1962 book “Silent Spring”; acid rain was not devastating German forests, as the Green
Party in that country said in the 1980s; the ozone hole was not
making rabbits and salmon blind, as Al Gore warned in the 1990s.
Yet taking precautionary action against pesticides, acid rain and
ozone thinning proved manageable, so maybe not much harm was
done.

Climate change is different. President Obama’s plan to cut U.S.
carbon-dioxide emissions from electricity plants by 32% (from 2005
levels) by 2030 would cut global emissions by about 2%. By that
time, according to Energy Information Administration data analyzed
by Heritage Foundation statistician Kevin Dayaratna, the
carbon plan could cost the U.S. up to $1 trillion in lost GDP. The
measures needed to decarbonize world energy are going to be vastly
more expensive. So we had better be sure that we are not
exaggerating the problem.

But it isn’t just that environmental threats have a habit of
turning out less bad than feared; it’s that the remedies sometimes
prove worse than the disease.

Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are a case in point. After
20 years and billions of meals, there is still no evidence that they harm
human health, and ample evidence of their environmental and
humanitarian benefits. Vitamin-enhanced GM “golden rice” has been
ready to save lives for years, but opposed at every step by
Greenpeace. Bangladeshi eggplant growers spray their
crops with insecticides up to 140 times in a season, risking their
own health, because the insect-resistant GMO version of the plant
is fiercely opposed by environmentalists. Opposition to GMOs has
certainly cost lives.

Besides, what did GMOs replace? Before transgenic crop
improvement was invented, the main way to breed new varieties was
“mutation breeding”: to scramble a plant’s DNA randomly, using
gamma rays or chemical mutagens, in the hope that some of the
monsters thus produced would have better yields or novel
characteristics. Golden Promise barley, for
example, a favorite of organic brewers, was produced this way. This
method still faces no special regulation, whereas precise transfer
of single well known genes, which could not possibly be less safe,
does.

Environmentalists are currently opposing neonicotinoid
pesticides on the grounds that they may hurt bee populations, even
though the European Union notes that honeybee numbers have been
rising in the 20 years since they were introduced. The effect in
Europe has been to cause farmers to return to much more harmful
pyrethroid insecticides, which are sprayed on crops instead of used
as seed dressing, hitting innocent bystander insects. And if
Europeans had been allowed to grow GMOs, then less pesticide would
be necessary. Again, green precaution increases risks.

Nuclear power has been energetically opposed by the
environmental lobby for decades, on the grounds of danger. Yet
nuclear power causes fewer deaths per unit of energy generated than
even wind and solar power. Compared with fossil fuels, nuclear
power has prevented 1.84 million more deaths than it caused,
according to a study by two NASA
researchers. Opposition to nuclear
power has cost lives.

Likewise widespread opposition to fracking for shale gas, is
based almost entirely on myths and lies, as Reason
magazine’s science correspondent, Ronald Bailey, has
reported. This opposition has substantially delayed the growth of
onshore gas production in Europe and in parts of the U.S. That has
meant more reliance on offshore gas, Russian gas, and coal—all of
which have greater safety issues and environmental risks.
Opposition to fracking has hurt the environment.

In short, the environmental movement has repeatedly denied
people access to safer technologies and forced them to rely on
dirtier, riskier or more harmful ones. It is adept at exploiting
people’s suspicion of anything new.

Many exaggerated early claims about the dangers of climate
change have now been debunked. The Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change has explicitly abandoned previous claims that
malaria will likely get worse, that the Gulf Stream will stop
flowing, the Greenland or West Antarctic Ice sheet will
disintegrate, a sudden methane release from the Arctic is likely,
the monsoon will collapse or long-term droughts will become more
likely.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the ledger, in contrast to our
experience with acid rain and the ozone layer, the financial,
humanitarian and environmental price of decarbonizing the energy
supply is proving much steeper than expected. Despite falling costs
of solar panels, the system cost of solar power, including land,
transmission, maintenance and nighttime backup, remains high. The
environmental impact of wind power—deforestation, killing of birds
of prey, mining of rare earth metals—is worse than expected.
According to the BP Statistical Review of World
Energy, these two sources of power provided, between them, just
1.35% of world energy in 2014, cutting emissions by even less than
that.

Indoor air pollution, caused mainly by cooking over wood fires
indoors, is the world’s biggest cause of environmental death. It
kills an estimated four million people every
year, as noted by the nonprofit science news website,
SciDev.Net. Getting fossil-fueled
electricity and gas to them is the cheapest and quickest way to
save their lives. To argue that the increasingly small risk of
dangerous climate change many decades hence is something they
should be more worried about is positively obscene.