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September 14 - September 14, 2022
Solar panels and wind turbines also require far more in the way of materials and produce more in the way of waste. Solar panels require sixteen times more materials69 in the form of cement, glass, concrete, and steel than do nuclear plants, and create three hundred times more waste.
Musk underestimated the required land area by 40 percent. Even if the solar panels were placed in the sunniest area of his sunniest option, the ecologically sensitive Sonoran Desert of Arizona, his solar farm would require an area larger than the state of Maryland.
roughly 10 percent of yearly demand in the United States, around 400 terawatt-hours, would need to be stored from one half of the year for use in the other in batteries (which would only charge and discharge once per year). At current lithium battery prices, that adds up to $188 trillion.
if the United States were to try to generate all of the energy it uses with renewables, 25 percent to 50 percent of all land in the United States would be required.87 By contrast, today’s energy system requires just 0.5 percent of land in the United States.
Direct emissions from burning combined with these adverse land use changes mean that the amount of carbon dioxide released from producing and burning biomass and biofuels is higher than from burning fossil fuels.
Scientists now know that corn making and using ethanol emits twice as much greenhouse gas as gasoline. Even switchgrass, long touted as more sustainable, produces 50 percent more emissions.
American taxpayers poured an astonishing $24 billion into failed biofuels experiments from 2009 to 2015.
Wind developers are allowed to self-report violations of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act. Only Hawaii requires bird and bat mortality data to be gathered by an independent third party and to be made available to the public on request.
Insects cluster at the same altitudes used by wind turbines. In Oklahoma, a major wind energy state, scientists found that the highest density of insects is between 150 to 250 meters.114 Large new turbine blades stretch from 60 to 220 meters above the ground.
While much of the media coverage has blamed industrial agriculture, it is notable that the biggest insect population declines are being reported in Europe and the United States, where the land area dedicated to agriculture has declined, over the last two decades. What have spread are wind turbines.
Sierra Club claims, falsely, “the toll from turbines is far from a major cause of bird mortality.”
Environmental Defense Fund repeats wind industry misinformation by claiming that “wind turbines kill far fewer songbirds than building collisions or cats,” and that “technological solutions are in the works.”
In 2013, U.S. wildlife officials outraged conservationists and bird enthusiasts when they took the unprecedented step of informing industrial wind energy developers that they would not prosecute them “for inadvertently harassing or even killing endangered California condors.”123 Said a spokesperson for Audubon, “I can’t believe the federal government is putting so much money into a historic and costly effort to establish a stable population of condors, and at the same time is issuing permits to kill them. Ludicrous.”
The number of wind farms the size of Deerfield that would be needed to replace the lost annual electricity from Vermont Yankee, one of the smallest nuclear plants remaining in the United States when it was closed, would have been fifty-six. At that rate, Vermont will make up for the clean energy lost from Vermont Yankee sometime around the year 2104.
350.org, it turns out, is funded by “Fossil Fuel Billionaire” Tom Steyer, who also happened to be running for president.
Wrong. Not only are 350.org, Sierra Club, NRDC, and EDF all funded by fossil fuel billionaires, they are also all trying to kill America’s largest source of carbon-free electricity, nuclear power.
McKibben is one of America’s most influential environmental activists and, as we have seen, successfully advocated closing Vermont’s nuclear plant, which contributed to the state’s emissions rising 16 percent rather than declining 25 percent, as planned.
“What was David Brower doing accepting money from an oilman?” his biographer wondered.30 The answer is that he was pioneering the environmental movement’s strategy of taking money from oil and gas investors and promoting renewables as a way to greenwash the closure of nuclear plants.
Climate activists massively outspend climate skeptics. The two largest U.S. environmental organizations, EDF and NRDC, have a combined annual budget of about $384 million compared to the mere $13 million of the two largest climate skeptic groups, Competitive Enterprise Institute and Heartland Institute. That amount of money, $384 million, is significantly more than all of the money Exxon gave to climate-skeptical organizations for two decades.
Between 1976 and 1979, Brown and his allies killed so many nuclear power plants that, had they been built, California would today be generating almost all of its electricity from zero-pollution power plants.
even after the project was killed for fear of corruption, Jerry Brown’s administration sought yet another oil and gas project with the Bustamante family. There were few apparent checks on Brown’s power.
Jerry Brown’s advocacy for natural gas was part and parcel of his antinuclear work, which didn’t end when he left office in 1983.
After Al Gore, Sr., the senator from Tennessee, lost reelection in 1972, he went to work for a coal power plant owned by Occidental Petroleum. “Since I had been turned out to pasture, I decided to go graze the tall grass,” Gore Sr. quipped, years later.64 As U.S. senator and vice president, Al Gore, Jr., helped advance the same company’s interests. Gore raised $50,000 from the company in phone calls he made from his office, triggering a minor scandal.
The Center for Public Integrity reported in January 2000 that, “since Gore became part of the Democratic ticket in the summer of 1992, Occidental has given more than $470,000 in soft money to various Democratic committees and causes.”66 According to the report, two days after the Occidental chairman slept in the Lincoln Bedroom, he donated $100,000 to the Democratic National Committee. The chairman was also a guest at a 1994 White House party for Boris Yeltsin. Occidental had an interest in Russian oil. Earlier that year, the chairman had traveled with President Bill Clinton’s commerce
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Gore personally accepted fossil fuel money in 2013. He and a co-owner sold Current TV to Al Jazeera, which is state-funded by Qatar, the oil-exporting nation whose citizens have the largest per capita carbon footprint in the world. One year earlier, Gore had said the goal of “reducing our dependence on expensive dirty oil” was “to save the future of civilization.”
Between 2011 and 2019, Jerry Brown served as California governor for a third and fourth term. During that time his sister, Kathleen Brown, was on the board of directors of Sempra Energy, one of the country’s largest natural gas companies, and owner of San Diego Gas & Electric. Brown actively sought to advance oil and gas interests. In 2011, he fired two state regulators because they were enforcing federal fracking regulations to protect California’s water quality.
The next year, Brown ordered California’s Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources to explore his personal land for oil and gas rights. The agency produced a fifty-one-page report complete with satellite images of oil and gas deposits for the area around Brown’s ranch. It was a brazen use of government resources for personal gain, but California’s newspaper reporters and editorial writers made little of the incident.
The scheme went forward. SONGS closed permanently, natural gas replaced the plant’s electrical output, and California’s carbon emissions spiked, as did electricity prices.
Stimulus money wasn’t evenly distributed but rather clustered around donors to President Obama and the Democratic Party. At least ten members of Obama’s finance committee and more than twelve of his fundraising bundlers, who raised a minimum of $100,000 for Obama, benefited from $16.4 billion of the $20.5 billion in stimulus loans.
In August 2019, Thunberg sailed from Europe to New York to set an example of how to live without emitting carbon. But Greta’s renewable-powered sailboat trip across the Atlantic produced four times more emissions than flying. The reason was that sailing required a sailboat crew, who flew back home afterward.
Today, the World Bank is diverting funding from cheap and reliable energy sources like hydroelectricity, fossil fuels, and nuclear, to expensive and unreliable ones like solar and wind. And in October 2019, the European Investment Bank announced it would halt all financing of fossil fuels in poor nations by 2021.
By the 1990s, only 5 percent of World Bank financing went to infrastructure. “Water infrastructure, as an instrument for growth and as a precondition for economic growth, had essentially been thrust aside through a process led by the rich countries which already have their infrastructure,” explained Briscoe.
Poor nations, claimed the IPCC in 2018, can leapfrog centralized energy sources like dams, natural gas plants, and nuclear plants to decentralized energy sources such as solar panels and batteries. It did not cite Van Benthem or other economists who have debunked leapfrogging.34 In 2019, many NGOs, including the German Urgewald, campaigned for diverting World Bank funding away from large hydroelectric dams and fossil fuels to small-scale renewables like solar and wind.
“Time and time again I have seen NGOs and politicians in rich countries advocate that the poor follow a path that they, the rich, never have followed,” he wrote, “nor are willing to follow.”
Ransom’s perspective as a poet at Vanderbilt University was quite different from the one of the poor sharecroppers. The people of the Tennessee Valley region who suffered from malaria and hunger likely might have disagreed with the view that they had been living at peace with nature. Critics of Ransom and the Southern Agrarians called them “typewriter agrarians” in the same way people sometimes criticize upper-middle-class progressives as “latte liberals.”
But then, after World War II, Malthusianism switched sides and became a left-wing political movement in the form of environmentalism, while anti-Malthusianism became a right-wing political movement in the form of libertarian, pro-business, free market conservatism.
Like Vogt and Malthus before him, Ehrlich was particularly concerned with breeding by poor people in developing nations. During a taxi ride from the Delhi airport to his hotel downtown, Ehrlich described the Indians he looked down upon more contemptuously than a biologist would describe animals: “people eating, people washing, people sleeping. . . . People defecating and urinating. People, people, people, people.”
Ehrlich and Lovins said they opposed nuclear energy because it was abundant. “Even if nuclear power were clean, safe, economic, assured of ample fuel, and socially benign,” Lovins said, “it would still be unattractive because of the political implications of the kind of energy economy it would lock us into.”
Ehrlich and Holdren claimed in their 1977 textbook that the only way to feed seven billion people by the year 2000 was for people in the rich world to eat less meat and dairy—the same recommendation IPCC made in 2019.
“The problems of the 1970s and 1980s will not be famine and starvation but, ironically, problems of how best to dispose of food surpluses.” The same editor noted that fear-mongering “seems like patronizing neo-colonialism to people elsewhere.”
In 1981, the Indian economist Amartya Sen published a book showing that famines occur not because of lack of food but due to war, political oppression, and the collapse of food distribution, not production, systems. Sen won the Nobel Prize for economics in 1998.
The implication was wrong. Nuclear reactors cannot detonate like bombs. The fuel is not sufficiently “enriched” to do so. But mixing up reactors and bombs was, as we saw, the go-to strategy for Malthusian environmentalists.
his 1989 book, The End of Nature. In it, McKibben argued that humankind’s impact on the planet would require the same Malthusian program developed by Ehrlich and Commoner in the 1970s. Economic growth would have to end. Rich nations must return to farming and transfer wealth to poor nations so they could improve their lives modestly but not industrialize. And the human population would have to shrink to between 100 million and 2 billion.
“For the next three hours, we interviewed villager after villager, and found the same story,” Mallaby wrote. “The dam people had come and promised generous financial terms, and the villagers were happy to accept them and relocate. . . . The only people who objected to the dam were the ones living just outside its perimeter. They were angry because the project was not going to affect them. They had been offered no generous payout, and they were jealous of their neighbors.”
Why is International Rivers so opposed to dams? Partly because dams can make it harder to do recreational rafting. “The Batoka scheme will flood the gorge and drown the massive rapids that have made Victoria Falls a prime whitewater rafting location,” laments International Rivers about one project. Its allies consist of rafters around the world.
But the reason so many poor nations begin the process of urbanization, industrialization, and development by building large dams is that they produce inexpensive and reliable power, are simple to build and operate, and can last for a century or longer.
International Rivers is not seeking to remove dams in Switzerland nor in California, where for one hundred years they have provided the state with cheap, reliable, and abundant electricity, freshwater for drinking and agriculture, and flood control.121
One explanation for the tone-deaf hypocrisy of celebrities who moralize about climate change while jetting around the globe is that they aren’t being tone deaf at all. On the contrary, they are flaunting their special status. Hypocrisy is the ultimate power move. It is a way of demonstrating that one plays by a different set of rules from the ones adhered to by common people.
economic growth was what lifted Suparti out of poverty, saved the whales, and is the hope for Bernadette, once Congo achieves security and peace. Economic growth is necessary for creating the infrastructure required for protecting people from natural disasters, climate-related or not. And economic growth created Sweden’s wealth, including that of Thunberg’s own family. It is fair to say that without economic growth, the person who is Greta Thunberg would not exist.
Schelling’s view was simply that the effects of restricting energy consumption could be worse than the effects of global warming. That view was mainstream back then and remains so today.
