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September 14 - September 14, 2022
Then, in 1918, chemists discovered how to solidify whale oil while eliminating the smell and taste, allowing it to be used for the first time as margarine.
It was vegetable oil, not an international treaty, that saved the whales. Ninety-nine percent of all whales killed in the twentieth century had occurred by the time the International Whaling Commission (IWC) got around to imposing a moratorium in 1982.34 The Commission’s moratorium on whaling in the 1980s, according to the economists who did the most careful study, was a “rubber stamp” on a “situation that had already emerged. . . . Regulation was not important in stabilizing populations.”
The International Whaling Commission set whaling quotas, but they weren’t low enough to prevent over-whaling. “In theory, the IWC was meant to regulate the killing of whales; in practice, the IWC functioned more like an international hunting club.” Concludes the leading historian of the period, “The thirty years of work by the IWC have proven a fiasco.”
Not a single whale species is at risk of extinction. Nations harvest fewer than two thousand whales annually, an amount that is 97 percent less than the nearly seventy-five thousand whales killed in 1960.38 The moral of the story, for the economists who studied how vegetable oil saved the whales, was that, “to some extent, economies can ‘outgrow’ severe environmental exploitation.”39
But Marchetti found that “the market regularly moved away from a certain primary energy source, long before it was exhausted, at least at world level.”
While scarcity helps incentivize entrepreneurs like Drake’s investors to create alternatives, it is often rising economic growth and rising demand for a specific energy service, like lighting, transportation, heat, or industry, that allows fossil fuels to replace renewables, and oil and gas to replace coal.
Energy transitions have occurred in the way that Marchetti predicted, from more energy-dilute and carbon-dense fuels toward more energy-dense and hydrogen-dense ones. Just as coal is twice as energy-dense as wood, petroleum is more energy-dense than coal, as is natural gas, when converted to liquid form.51
The chemistry is simple to understand. Coal is comprised of roughly one carbon atom for every hydrogen atom. Petroleum is comprised of one carbon atom for every two hydrogen atoms. And natural gas, or rather, its main component, methane, has four hydrogen atoms to one carbon atom, hence its molecular expression as CH4.
And yet, on virtually every metric, natural gas is cleaner than coal. Natural gas emits 17 to 40 times less sulfur dioxide, a fraction of the nitrous oxide that coal emits, and almost no mercury.65 Natural gas is one-eighth as deadly as coal, counting both accidents and air pollution.66 And burning gas rather than coal for electricity requires 25 to 50 times less water.
Pollution regulations helped make coal plants more expensive to build and operate. But, as Marchetti predicted, and similar to what we saw with whales, what mattered most was the creation of a more power-dense, abundant, and cheaper alternative. What Marchetti didn’t foresee was how powerful and important opposition to the new technology, particularly from upper classes of society, could be in the case of energy transitions.
The scientist who first raised the concern that genetically engineered fish could threaten wild fish stocks is today one of its most outspoken advocates. “I won’t argue that a genetically engineered salmon will never find its way into the ocean,” he said. “But there’s nothing in this fish that would last more than a single generation because of its low fitness.”
And had there been freer markets, nations like Japan and Norway might have switched from whale oil to vegetable oil much sooner. “What probably sustains the whaling industry against the inroads of vegetable oil,” reported The New York Times in 1959, “is the desire of the whaling nations to conserve their foreign exchange. In general, they do not produce enough vegetable oil for their own needs and hence must either catch whales or buy fats and oil abroad.”
The moral of the story is that economic growth and the rising demand for food, lighting, and energy drive product and energy transitions, but politics can constrain them. Energy transitions depend on people wanting them. When it comes to protecting the environment by moving to superior alternatives, public attitudes and political action matter.
As such, were IPCC’s “most extreme” scenario of global veganism to be realized—in which, by 2050, humans completely cease to consume animal products and all livestock land is reforested—total carbon emissions would decline by just 10 percent.
Another study found that if every American reduced her or his meat consumption by one-quarter, greenhouse emissions would be reduced by just 1 percent. If every American became vegetarian, U.S. emissions would drop by just 5 percent.
Study after study comes to the same conclusion. One found that, for individuals in developed nations, going vegetarian would reduce emissions by just 4.3 percent, on average.16 And yet another found that, if every American went vegan, emissions would decline by just 2.6 percent.
Plant-based diets, researchers find, are cheaper than those that include meat. As a result, people often end up spending their money on things that use energy, like consumer products. This phenomenon is known as the rebound effect. If consumers respent their saved income on consumer goods, which require energy, the net energy savings would only be .07 percent, and the net carbon reduction just 2 percent.18 It is for that reason that reducing carbon emissions in energy, not food or use of land more broadly, matters most. And energy includes electricity, transportation, cooking, and heating,
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The good news is that the total amount of land humankind uses to produce meat peaked in the year 2000. Since then, the land dedicated to livestock pasture around the world, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N., has decreased by more than 540 million square miles, an area 80 percent as large as Alaska.22 All of this happened without a vegetarian revolution. Today, just 2 to 4 percent of Americans are vegetarian or vegan. About 80 percent of those who try to become vegetarian or vegan eventually abandon their diet, and more than half do so within the first year.
Pasture beef generates 300 to 400 percent more carbon emissions per kilogram than industrial beef.32 This difference in emissions comes down to diet and lifespan. Cows raised at industrial farms are typically sent from pastures to feedlots at about nine months old, and then they are sent to slaughter at fourteen to eighteen months. Grass-fed cattle spend their entire lives at pasture and aren’t slaughtered until between eighteen to twenty-four months of age. Since grass-fed cows gain weight more slowly and live longer, they produce more manure and methane.
Foer unwittingly advocates nineteenth-century farming methods that, if adopted, would require turning wildlife-rich protected areas like Virunga Park into gigantic cattle ranches.
Farmers make this point to Foer in Eating Animals. “You simply can’t feed billions of people free-range eggs. . . . It’s cheaper to produce an egg in a massive laying barn with caged hens,” says one. “It’s more efficient and that means it’s more sustainable. . . . Do you think family farms are going to sustain a world of ten billion?”
Taubes unearthed studies finding that a high-fat diet would lead to weight loss and improvements in heart disease risk factors compared to the kind of low-fat, plant-rich diets that the American Heart Association and the U.S. government had been advising us to eat since the 1960s and 1980s, respectively.
But Grandin didn’t find that cattle needed to be raised on grass-fed pastures in order to be calm. Rather, she found that what cattle most wanted was cleanliness and predictability. “Keeping the pens dry and keeping cattle clean—that’s really important,” she said.
people would rightly wonder if their vegetarianism biased their scientific objectivity. In my research I kept coming across cases of vegetarian activists who kept their motives hidden.
Taubes and Teicholz seemed partly vindicated in late summer 2019, when the British Medical Journal published a review of the nutritional science that upended decades of orthodoxy. “Diets that replace saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat do not convincingly reduce cardiovascular events or mortality,” it found. The authors said we “must consider that the diet-heart hypothesis is invalid or requires modification.”
One month later, just as vegetarian critics were starting to respond to the BMJ, the prestigious U.S. scientific journal Annals of Internal Medicine published two of the largest and more rigorous studies of meat consumption to date. They found that any negative health impacts of eating red meat, to the extent they exist at all, would be too small to matter.
The pro-carb, anti-fat crusade turned out to be as bad for the environment as it was for people. By making pigs less fatty, breeders made them less efficient in converting feed into body mass. More grain and thus more land was required under the low-fat regime than would have been required under a normal-fat one.
The evidence suggests we should have been more concerned by the absence of fat in our meat than by the use of hormones in its production.
If you’re not actually helping the planet, the calculation definitely changes. Besides, now I more clearly see a separation between humans and animals. Killing a chicken is not the same as murdering a human. There’s an important difference there.”
What about non-thyroid cancers? The 2019 HBO miniseries Chernobyl claimed there was “a dramatic spike in cancer rates across Ukraine and Belarus.”12 That assertion is false: residents of those two countries were “exposed to doses slightly above natural background radiation levels,” according to the World Health Organization (WHO). If there are additional cancer deaths they will be “about 0.6 percent of the cancer deaths expected in this population due to other causes.”13
In Fukushima, Thomas says, nobody will die from radiation they were exposed to because of the nuclear accident.
It’s not that nuclear energy never kills. It’s that its death toll is vanishingly small. Here are some annual death totals: walking (270,000), driving (1.35 million), working (2.3 million), air pollution (4.2 million).18 By contrast, nuclear’s known total death toll is just over one hundred.
As a result, when the worst occurs with nuclear—and the fuel melts—the amount of particulate matter that escapes from the plant is insignificant in comparison to the particulate matter from fossil- and biomass-burning homes, cars, and power plants, which killed eight million people in 2016.
Consequently, some activists who were originally focused on nuclear weapons disarmament began displacing their anxieties on nuclear reactors instead.77 Displacement is a psychological concept very similar to scapegoating. The idea is that we take our negative emotions out on weaker objects because we fear the more powerful object. If the boss yells at us, we kick the dog because talking back to the boss is too dangerous. In this case, the nuclear weapons were the boss and nuclear power plants were the dog.
All told, antinuclear groups killed six nuclear reactors in Ohio, including Zimmer, which was 97 percent complete before being converted into a coal plant. Environmental groups Sierra Club, NRDC, and Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) accepted the conversion of Zimmer from nuclear to coal without complaint.
All in all, the antinuclear movement managed to help kill in planning or cancel during or after construction half of all nuclear reactors that utilities in the United States had planned to build, even when it was known and acknowledged by everyone, including the environmental groups, that coal plants would be built instead.
A Sierra Club member who led the campaign to kill Diablo Canyon confessed, “I really didn’t care [about nuclear plant safety] because there are too many people in the world anyway. . . . I think that playing dirty, if you have a noble end, is fine.”
The experience left Sierra Club board member and landscape photographer Ansel Adams bitter. “It shows how people can be really fundamentally dishonest at times,” he said.
Women as far away from the accident as Western Europe were misled to believe that Chernobyl radiation had contaminated them, which led them to terminate 100,000 to 200,000 pregnancies in a panic.
In response to Fukushima, the Japanese government shut down its nuclear plants and replaced them with fossil fuels. As a result, the cost of electricity went up, resulting in the deaths of a minimum of 1,280 people from the cold between 2011 and 2014.110 In addition, scientists estimate that there were about 1,600 (unnecessary) evacuation deaths and more than four thousand (avoidable) air pollution deaths per year.
The Colorado plateau is more naturally radioactive than most of Fukushima was after the accident.114 “There are areas of the world that are more radioactive than Colorado and the inhabitants there do not show increased rates of cancer,” said Gerry. And whereas radiation levels at Fukushima declined rapidly, “those [other] areas stay high over a lifetime, since the radiation is not the result of contamination but of natural background radiation.” Even residents living in areas of Fukushima with the highest levels of soil contamination were unaffected by the radiation, according to a major study
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While renewables in 2018 globally generated 11 percent of total primary energy, 64 percent of it (7 percent of total primary energy) came from hydroelectric dams.6 And dams are largely maxed out in developed nations, while their construction is opposed by environmentalists in poor and developing ones.
Consider Tesla’s most famous battery project, a 129 megawatt-hour lithium battery storage center in Australia. It provides enough backup power for 7,500 homes for four hours.8 But, there are nine million homes in Australia, and 8,760 hours in a year.
One of the largest lithium battery storage centers in the world is in Escondido, California. But it can only store enough power for about twenty-four thousand American homes for four hours.9 There are about 134 million households in the United States.
for the United States to be powered by solar and wind, while using batteries to ensure reliable power, the battery storage required would raise the cost to more than $23 trillion.12 That number is $1 trillion higher than U.S. gross domestic product was in 2019.
Linowes and others learned that a wind farm requires roughly 450 times more land than a natural gas power plant.
Linowes learned early on that, in many countries, wind turbines pose the single greatest threat to bats after habitat loss and white-nose syndrome. “The wind industry is well aware of the problem yet vigorously resists even modest mitigations known to reduce bat mortality at operating wind facilities,” she said. “The result is that many of our bat species are on a path to extinction. Even five years ago they were abundant in large numbers, particularly the hoary bat, but they’ve declined heavily.”
The wind industry claims house cats kill more birds than wind turbines, but whereas cats mainly kill small, common birds, like sparrows, robins, and jays, wind turbines kill big, threatened, and slow-to-reproduce species like hawks, eagles, owls, and condors.
The dilute nature of sunlight means that solar farms require large amounts of land and thus come with significant environmental impacts. This is true even for the world’s sunniest places. California’s most famous solar farm, Ivanpah, requires 450 times more land than its last operating nuclear plant, Diablo Canyon.
The maximum efficiency of wind turbines is 59.3 percent, something scientists have known for more than one hundred years.66 The achievable power density of a solar farm is up to 50 watts of electricity per square meter. By contrast, the power density of natural gas and nuclear plants ranges from 2,000 to 6,000 watts per square meter.
