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July 1 - July 29, 2020
But the loans were just one program among many others that funneled money to well-connected Obama donors without creating many jobs. The most famous of the green investments was when DOE gave $573 million to a solar company called Solyndra, 35 percent of which was owned by a billionaire donor and fundraising bundler for Obama, George Kaiser. Nobody wanted to invest in Solyndra because its panels were too expensive, which independently minded DOE staffers pointed out. They were overruled, however, and the loan was approved. The people who benefited the most from the green stimulus were
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Where the news media have for decades demonized Exxon, the Koch brothers, and climate skeptics, they have largely given a pass to fossil fuel billionaires like Steyer and Bloomberg and the environmentalists they fund. Steyer and Bloomberg may be motivated to do good in the world, but so may be the Koch brothers. Financial conflicts of interest are no less conflicts of interest just because a person is ideologically committed.
If Steyer and other fossil fuel and renewable energy investors get their way and kill some or all of the remaining ninety-nine U.S. nuclear reactors, which provide nearly 20 percent of America’s electricity, they will not only make a fortune, they will spike emissions and eliminate the only real hope for phasing out fossil fuels before 2050.
Prince Harry, who described the climate emergency to the assembled guests, bare-footed, had recently written on Instagram, “With nearly 7.7 billion people inhabiting this Earth, every choice, every footprint, every action makes a difference.”
Two weeks later, just as the controversy was starting to die down, media reported that Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex, and their new baby had taken two additional trips on private planes, first to Ibiza, Spain, and then, a few weeks later, to the town of Nice on the French Riviera.4 While an economy class ticket from London to Nice costs £232 (U.S. $306), a private jet flight costs £20,000 (U.S. $29,000).5 “Frankly it’s hypocritical. Harry can’t be preaching about the catastrophic effects of climate change while jetting around the world on a private plane,”
But the problem wasn’t that the celebrities were flaunting their high-energy lifestyles. The problem was that they were moralizing for low-energy lives.
Al Gore wouldn’t have been similarly embarrassed by Associated Press for living in a twenty-room home that used twelve times more energy than the average home in Nashville, Tennessee, had he not claimed, “We are going to have to change the way we live our lives” to solve climate change.
The reason even the most sincere greens consume large quantities of energy is simple: living in wealthy nations and doing things that people in wealthy nations do, from driving and flying to eating and living in a home, requires significant quantities of energy.
Per capita income remains tightly coupled with per capita energy consumption. There is no rich low-energy nation just as there is no poor high-energy one. While Europeans consume less energy than Americans, on average, this is due less to environmental virtue and more to the fact that they rely more on trains and less on cars, due to higher population densities.
While environmentalists have not had the political power to restrict energy consumption and thus economic growth in rich nations, they have, for fifty years, had enough to restrict it in poorer and weaker ones. 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 2021.17
Added Briscoe, “Every presently rich country has developed more than 70 percent of its economically viable hydroelectric potential. Africa has developed 3 percent of its potential.”
The United Nations pioneered the notion that poor nations could grow rich without using much energy, in sharp contrast to every other rich nation in the world.
The fact that developed nations required fossil fuels to grow wealthy could not possibly have been a mystery to the lead author of Our Common Future, Gro Brundtland. After all, she was the former prime minister of Norway, a nation that just a decade earlier had become one of the richest in the world thanks to its abundant oil and gas reserves.
The United Nations and environmental NGOs described their work as helping poor nations “avoid the mistakes made in the industrialised world,” in the words of the UN Development Program.
As climate change emerged as an elite concern in the 1990s, efforts within developed nations to cut off financing for cheap energy, industrial agriculture, and modern infrastructure to poor and developed nations grew stronger.
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.
Toward the end of his life, Briscoe was deeply upset by the success of green NGOs in pressuring Western nations to divert funding away from basic infrastructure and agricultural modernization to various “sustainable development” experiments. “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.”36 Why is that?
Thomas Robert Malthus, an economist, grew so annoyed with Enlightenment optimism that, in his early thirties, he sought to refute Godwin and Condorcet in a 1798 book called An Essay on the Principle of Population. Malthus argued that human progress was unsustainable.
The British governor general of India between 1876 and 1880 argued that the Indian population “has a tendency to increase more rapidly than the food it raises from the soil.”52 Later he claimed the “limits of increase of production and of population have been reached.”
In 1942 and 1943, as India produced food and manufactured goods for the British war effort, food shortages emerged. Food imports could have alleviated the crisis, but Prime Minister Winston Churchill refused to allow it. Why? “Much of the answer must lie in the Malthusian mentality of Churchill and his key advisors,” concludes historian Robert Mayhew. “Indians are breeding like rabbits and being paid a million a day by us for doing nothing about the war,” Churchill claimed, falsely. Partly as a result of his decisions, three million people died in the Bengali famine of 1942 to 1943, which was
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In the early twentieth century, the Tennessee Valley region of the United States was a lot like the Congo today. Deforestation was rising. Agricultural yields were declining due to soil erosion. Malaria plagued the region. Few had adequate medical care. Fewer had indoor plumbing or electricity.
By 1933, Norris had convinced Congress and the newly elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt to create what would be called the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). It built dams and fertilizer factories and installed irrigation systems. The TVA trained local farmers to teach others how to increase crop yields. And it planted trees. There were trade-offs. About twenty thousand families were relocated through eminent domain and condemnation. Nearly seventy thousand individual burial plots were either removed or left in place.57 Huge areas were flooded with water. But those sacrifices were a small
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But a homegrown backlash against industrialization and agricultural modernization had started to brew even before the federal government created the TVA. In 1930, forty-two-year-old Rhodes scholar and Tennessee poet John Crowe Ransom wrote in the opening essay in a famous collection, I’ll Take My Stand, “the latter-day societies have been seized—none quite so violently as our American one—with the strange idea that the human destiny is not to secure an honorable peace with nature, but to wage an unrelenting war on nature.”58 Ransom and the other “Southern Agrarians” disparaged cities and
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By contrast, socialists and leftists loathed Malthus. Marx and Engels called him a “stain on the human race.” Malthus, in their view, had made an avoidable situation look inevitable, or “natural.”
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.
But most resistance to Malthusianism came from the political right. The most prominent critic of Malthusian alarmists was Julian Simon, an economist who argued “natural resources are not finite,” and that children weren’t just mouths to feed but rather grow up to be producers, not just consumers.62 Simon was embraced by conservative and libertarian scholars, think tanks, and media, not left-wing and progressive ones. Why was that?
American leaders and elites embraced Malthusian ideas just as British elites had. In 1965, in the first televised State of the Union address, President Lyndon Johnson described the “explosion in world population and the growing scarcity in world resources” as the most important issue in the world. He called for “population control.”
Many conservation leaders embraced Malthusianism. In 1968, Sierra Club executive director David Brower conceived and edited a book, The Population Bomb, by Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich, which claimed the world was on the brink of mass starvation. “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”
Johnny Carson had Ehrlich on The Tonight Show six times, helping Ehrlich sell more than three million copies of The Population Bomb.
Top academic institutions helped make Malthusian ideas mainstream. In 1972, an NGO called the Club of Rome published The Limits to Growth, a report concluding that the planet was on the brink of ecological collapse, which The New York Times covered on its front page.
Lovins, for his part, married the demand for energy scarcity to a romantic vision of a “soft energy” future that rejected the infrastructure of the rich world. In 1976, Foreign Affairs published a thirteen-thousand-word essay by Lovins making the case for small-scale energy production instead of large-scale power plants.
The Malthusians significantly modified Malthus. Where Malthus warned that overpopulation would result in a scarcity of food, Malthusians in the 1960s and 1970s warned that energy abundance would result in overpopulation, environmental destruction, and societal collapse. 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.”
By 1980, nearly half a century after President Roosevelt created the TVA, the Democratic Party had reversed itself on the question of abundance versus scarcity. In 1930, Democrats had understood the necessity of cheap energy and food to lifting people out of poverty, but by 1980, President Jimmy Carter’s administration had endorsed the “limits to growth” hypothesis.
In 1972, the editor of Nature predicted, “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.”92 Others agreed. One demographer said the problem wasn’t a population explosion but rather a “nonsense explosion.”
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. And, as would become routine in U.N. reports, including those published by the IPCC for the next three decades, the United Nations’ 1987 report “Our Common Future” attacked nuclear energy as unsafe and strongly recommended against its expansion.
There is a pattern. Malthusians raise the alarm about resource or environmental problems and then attack the obvious technical solutions. Malthus had to attack birth control to predict overpopulation. Holdren and Ehrlich had to claim fossil fuels were scarce to oppose the extension of fertilizers and industrial agriculture to poor nations and to raise the alarm over famine. And climate activists today have to attack natural gas and nuclear energy, the main drivers of lower carbon emissions, in order to warn of climate apocalypse.
In 1982, a group of economists who called themselves “ecological economists” met in Stockholm, Sweden, and published a manifesto arguing that nature imposes hard limits on human activity. “Ecological economists distinguished themselves from neo-Malthusian catastrophists by switching the emphasis from resources to systems,” notes an environmental historian.
McKibben has done more to popularize Malthusian ideas than any other writer. The first book about global warming written for a popular audience was 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.
