Posted on 10/25/2014 8:47:33 AM PDT by Kaslin
Back in 1970, when I got involved in the first Earth Day and nascent environmental movement, we had real pollution problems. But over time, new laws, regulations, attitudes and technologies cleaned up our air, water and sloppy industry practices. By contrast, today’s battles are rarely about the environment.
As Ron Arnold and I detail in our new book, Cracking Big Green: To save the world from the save-the-Earth money machine, today’s eco-battles pit a $13.4-billion-per-year U.S. environmentalist industry against the reliable, affordable, 82 percent fossil fuel energy that makes our jobs, living standards, health, welfare and environmental quality possible. A new Senate Minority Staff Report chronicles how today’s battles pit poor, minority and blue-collar families against a far-left “Billionaires Club” and the radical environmentalist groups it supports and directs, in collusion with federal, state and local bureaucrats, politicians and judges – and with thousands of corporate bosses and alarmist scientists who profit mightily from the arrangements.
These ideologues run masterful, well-funded, highly coordinated campaigns that have targeted, not just coal, but all hydrocarbon energy, as well as nuclear and even hydroelectric power. They fully support the Obama agenda, largely because they helped create that agenda.
They seek ever-greater control over our lives, livelihoods, living standards and liberties – in part because they know they will rarely, if ever, be held accountable for the fraudulent science they employ and the callous, careless or deliberate harm they inflict. And because they know their wealth and power will largely shield them from the deprivations that their policies impose on the vast majority of Americans.
These Radical Greens have shuttered coal mines, coal-fired power plants, factories, the jobs that went with them, and the family security, health and welfare that went with those jobs. They have largely eliminated leasing, drilling, mining and timber harvesting across hundreds of millions of acres in the western United States and Alaska – and are now targeting ranchers. In an era of innovative seismic and drilling technologies, they have cut oil production by 6% on federally controlled onshore and offshore lands.
Meanwhile, thanks to a hydraulic fracturing revolution that somehow flew in under the Radical Green radar, oil production on state and private lands has soared by 60% – from 5 million barrels per day in 2008 (the lowest ebb since 1943) to 8 million bpd in 2014. Natural gas output climbed even more rapidly. This production reduced gas and gasoline prices and created hundreds of thousands of jobs in hundreds of industries and virtually every state. So now, of course, Big Green is waging war on “fracking” (which the late Total Oil CEO Christophe de Margerie jovially preferred to call “rock massage”).
As Marita Noon recently noted, Environment America has issued a phony “Fracking by the Numbers” screed. It grossly misrepresents this 67-year-old technology and falsely claims the oil industry deliberately obscures the alleged environmental, health and community impacts of fracking, by limiting its definition to only the actual moment in the extraction process when rock is fractured. For facts about fracking, revisit a few of my previous articles: here, here and here.
Moreover, when it comes to renewable energy, Big Green studiously ignores its own demands for full disclosure and obfuscates the impacts of technologies it promotes. Wind power is a perfect example.
Far from being “free” and “eco-friendly,” wind-based electricity is extremely unreliable and expensive, despite the mandates and subsidies lavished on it. The cradle-to-grave ecological impacts are startling.
The United States currently has over 40,000 turbines, up to 450 feet tall and 1.5 megawatts in nameplate output. Unpredictable winds mean they generate electricity at 15-20 percent of this “rated capacity.” The rest of the time mostly fossil fuel generators do the work. That means we need 5 to 15 times more steel, concrete, copper and other raw materials, to build huge wind facilities, transmission lines to far-off urban centers, and “backup” generators – than if we simply built the backups near cities and forgot about the turbines.
Every one of those materials requires mining, processing, shipping – and fossil fuels. Every turbine, backup generator and transmission line component requires manufacturing, shipping – and fossil fuels. The backups run on fossil fuels, and because they must “ramp up” dozens of times a day, they burn fuel very inefficiently, need far more fuel, and emit far more “greenhouse gases,” than if we simply built the backups and forgot about the wind turbines. The related land and environmental impacts are enormous.
Environmentalists almost never mention any of this – or the wildlife and human impacts.
Bald and golden eagles and other raptors are attracted to wind turbines, by prey and the prospect of using the towers for perches, nests and resting spots, Save the Eagles International president Mark Duchamp noted in comments to the US Fish & Wildlife Service. As a result, thousands of these magnificent flyers are slaughtered by turbines every year. Indeed, he says, turbines are “the perfect ecological trap” for attracting and killing eagles, especially as more and more are built in and near important habitats.
Every year, Duchamp says, they also butcher millions of other birds and millions of bats that are attracted to turbines by abundant insects – or simply fail to see the turbine blades, whose tips travel at 170 mph.
Indeed, the death toll is orders of magnitude higher than the “only” 440,000 per year admitted to by Big Wind companies and the USFWS. Using careful carcass counts tallied for several European studies, I have estimated that turbines actually kill at least 13,000,000 birds and bats per year in the USA alone!
Wildlife consultant Jim Wiegand has written several articles that document these horrendous impacts on raptors, the devious methods the wind industry uses to hide the slaughter, and the many ways the FWS and Big Green collude with Big Wind operators to exempt wind turbines from endangered species, migratory bird and other laws that are imposed with iron fists on oil, gas, timber and mining companies. The FWS and other Interior Department agencies are using sage grouse habitats and White Nose Bat Syndrome to block mining, drilling and fracking. But wind turbines get a free pass, a license to kill.
Big Green, Big Wind and Big Government regulators likewise almost never mention the human costs – the sleep deprivation and other health impacts from infrasound noise and constant light flickering effects associated with nearby turbines, as documented by Dr. Sarah Laurie and other researchers.
In short, wind power may well be our least sustainable energy source – and the one least able to replace fossil fuels or reduce carbon dioxide emissions that anti-energy activists falsely blame for climate change (that they absurdly claim never happened prior to the modern industrial age). But of course their rants have nothing to do with climate change or environmental protection.
The climate change dangers exist only in computer models, junk-science “studies” and press releases. But as the “People’s Climate March” made clear, today’s watermelon environmentalists (green on the outside, red on the inside) do not merely despise fossil fuels, fracking and the Keystone pipeline. They also detest free enterprise capitalism, modern living standards, private property … and even pro football!
They invent and inflate risks that have nothing to do with reality, and dismiss the incredible benefits that fracking and fossil fuels have brought to people worldwide. They go ballistic over alleged risks of using modern technologies, but are silent about the clear risks of not using those technologies. And when it comes to themselves, Big Green and the Billionaires Club oppose and ignore the transparency, integrity, democracy and accountability that they demand from everyone they attack.
The upcoming elections offer an opportunity to start changing this arrogant, totalitarian system – and begin rolling back some of the radical ideologies and agendas that have been too institutionalized in Congress, our courts, Executive Branch and state governments. May we seize the opportunity.
It was never about the environment.
I’m for protecting nature as much as every one else.
But I have never been one of those people who thinks man should simply get out of the way on this planet.
Radical environmentalism is truly a threat to us all.
It’s always about money or power.
And power is always about money.
Yes and being one of the people who got fooled into jumping on that bandwagon when I was in college, the realization of that charade is what made me look at other garbage I had bought into. That introspection led me to conservatism and makes it hard to talk with people my age who remain duped after a long life in which so much truth has not registered with them.
Its about capitalism.
They hate it and the Green Agenda is a Trojan Horse to dismantle our entire way of life.
Protecting the environment is beside the point.
Poverty initiatives are not about the poor.
Childrens' initiatives are not about kids.
Health insurance reform is not... Anyone sensing a pattern here?
That is for sure
It is indeed
As many have noted, “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the Revolution.”
And the “Revolution” is always about creating problems and seizing power.
I think I realized that radical environmentalists are really after totalitarian dictatorship, not about cleaning the environment, when I read something about “environmental racism” or some such silly thing back in the 1990s. That article discussed how poor people are disproportionately affected by pollution, and it’s all the fault of the rich. It made no sense—when people become wealthier, they have the wherewithal to clean their neighborhoods, and install smoke stack scrubbers, and do all the other things to mitigate pollution—but the radical environmentalists are absolutely against anyone making money or earning a profit.
There are sane balances. Not everything can leave a completely pristine environment. But smog choked cities and burning rivers aren’t a very good statement to make either. A good principle would be to try to leave what you aren’t using now in as good a condition as practical, so it will be available should it be needed later.
Fallen man is always tempted to take short cuts, and there could have been some truth among the trash talk. Choosing lower class neighborhoods to put the more polluting enterprises in, etc. (Though again there is a balance... maybe those enterprises will generate badly needed jobs.)
We must look at the entire picture. What we can’t do is idolize Gaia. That would result in the ironic conclusion that man, the one with the scruples in the situation, should drive himself extinct.
I was in high school in 1970. Stuyvesant on 15th between 1st and second avenues. Big earth day rally going on in union square which is some 4 blocks west of the school. I cut school that day not for the rally but because did lots of that back then. I walked over and saw this enormous crowd milling about, people with loudspeakers and so forth. Only one thing stuck with me from that day but has all these years later remained a vibrant memory. Traffic jammed in every direction. Union square is a major intersection and all you could se was those old gas guzzlers sitting there spewing fumes into the air.
I may have only been 16 at the time but the irony of the left’s inability to do anything intelligently never left me.
Big tribute to Mother Earth huh. Not even the sincerity of bicycles.
I agree. It was ALWAYS about BIG Government Socialism and MONEY! IMHO.
It was pretty remarkable for its stupidity.
Checking out at the store, the young cashier suggested to the older woman, that she should bring her own grocery bags because plastic bags weren’t good for the environment.
The woman apologized and explained, “We didn’t have this green thing back in my earlier days.” The young clerk responded, “That’s our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment for future generations.”
She was right — our generation didn’t have the green thing in its day.
Back then, we returned milk bottles, soda bottles and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled, so it could use the same bottles over and over. So they really were truly recycled. But we didn’t have the green thing back in our day.
Grocery stores bagged our groceries in brown paper bags, that we reused for numerous things, most memorable besides household garbage bags, was the use of brown paper bags as book covers for our schoolbooks.
This was to ensure that public property, (the books provided for our use by the school) was not defaced by our scribbling’s. Then we were able to personalize our books on the brown paper bags. But too bad we didn’t do the green thing back then.
We walked up stairs, because we didn’t have an escalator in every store and office building. We walked to the grocery store and didn’t climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two blocks. But she was
right. We didn’t have the green thing in our day.
Back then, we washed the baby’s diapers because we didn’t have the throwaway kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy-gobbling machine burning up 220 volts — wind and solar power really did dry our clothes back in our early days. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing. But that young lady is right; we didn’t have the
green thing back in our day.
Back then, we had one TV, or radio, in the house — not a TV in every room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief (remember them?), not a screen the size of the state of Montana.
In the kitchen, we blended and stirred by hand because we didn’t have electric machines to do everything for us.
When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used wadded up old newspapers to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap.
Back then, we didn’t fire up an engine and burn gasoline just to cut the lawn. We used a push mower that ran on human power. We exercised by working so we didn’t need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that
operate on electricity. But she’s right; we didn’t have the green thing back then.
We drank from a fountain when we were thirsty instead of using a cup or a plastic bottle every time we had a drink of water. We refilled writing pens with ink instead of
buying a new pen, and we replaced the razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull. But we didn’t have the green thing back then.
Back then, people took the streetcar or a bus and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their moms into a 24-hour taxi service. We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And we didn’t need a
computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 23,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest burger joint.
But isn’t it sad the current generation laments how wasteful we old folks were just because we didn’t have the green thing back then?
Please forward this on to another selfish old person who needs a lesson in conservation from a smart-ass young person.
Big government socialism and money greed aren’t why America does not today sport cities whose air looks like Beijing’s, or rivers that look like the Yangtze (or which burn, as one in Ohio did).
However, China shows that when such things dominate the scene enough, the results are destructive, not constructive.
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