Keith Lockitch — VOICES for REASON

Environmentalists claim, with ever-increasing hysteria, that our consumption of carbon-based energy in pursuit of prosperity and economic growth is altering the earth’s climate. Human survival, they insist, requires the immediate abandonment of fossil fuels, which provide more than 80 percent of the world’s energy, in favor of carbon-free sources.

Yet, at the same time, environmentalist groups have vehemently opposed, as unacceptable intrusions on nature, projects involving every alternative form of energy ever proposed to replace fossil fuels—including such supposedly green ventures as wind farms and solar power plants. Here’s the latest example:

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The Wall Street Journal recently commissioned Karen Armstrong, author of numerous books on religion, and Richard Dawkins, author of numerous books on evolution and atheism, to answer the question: “Where does evolution leave God?”

What I found most interesting about the exchange was an issue that neither discussed explicitly, but which lurked just beneath the surface of their answers: the fact that religion has co-opted the entire realm of the spiritual.

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In all of President Obama’s health care speech, there is one key sentence that reveals our leaders’ basic method of approaching the problem. It also makes clear why our health care system just keeps getting worse and why nothing that Congress passes will do anything to truly solve this mess.

Here is the relevant section, with the sentence highlighted in bold: Read the rest of this entry »

The Wall Street Journal recently reported on “small hydro” projects—hydroelectric power plants involving small dams on streams and tributaries, as opposed to giant dams on major rivers. Because hydro produces zero greenhouse gas emissions, these projects are being promoted by power companies hoping to avoid the fierce green opposition to carbon-based energy.

But environmentalists have also fiercely opposed hydro for decades, because massive dams flood large areas and dramatically alter waterways. (This list of Sierra Club “accomplishments” boasts of killing dam projects as far back as 1923.) The Journal story suggests that with small hydro, electricity producers are hoping to fly under the green radar by building smaller dams in remote locations.

The problem is that these hydro plants have a tiny generating capacity: Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve just had an article on climate policy published in the journal Energy and Environment. It will appear in a special issue of the journal focusing on “Climate Policy and Energy Poverty.”

The article takes what I think is a pretty unique approach to the topic. I don’t focus on the science of climate change–i.e., I don’t specifically address the question of whether or not man-made greenhouse gases are the dominant agents driving the earth’s climate (though I don’t accept the ubiquitous assertion that they are). Instead, I address an entirely different question; one that I think the proponents of climate change alarm ignore completely.

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The senate voted yesterday to extend the “Cash for Clunkers” program–a piece of Obama’s economic stimulus agenda in which the government doles out up to $4,500 for people to trade in older vehicles (the engines of which are then destroyed) for new cars that meet a government fuel efficiency standard.

Calling this “crackpot economics,” the Wall Street Journal points out that “the subsidy won’t add to net national wealth, since it merely transfers money to one taxpayer’s pocket from someone else’s, and merely pays that taxpayer to destroy a perfectly serviceable asset in return for something he might have bought anyway.”

Isn’t taking money from some people, giving it to others, and pretending that this creates wealth the essence of what Bernie Madoff was doing? The fact that Congress is doing it openly, with the sanction of law and under the guidance of Ivy League economists, doesn’t make it any less unjust.

One of the “clean energy” sources promoted by environmentalists is geothermal–energy derived from the natural heat deep below the earth’s surface. Unlike solar or wind power, which are intermittent and therefore unreliable sources of energy, geothermal heat is always present. It doesn’t require vast installations of unsightly, noisy wind turbines or immense arrays of mirrors or solar cells, and it produces no emissions whatsoever (except perhaps some water vapor from cooling units).

But before you cue the chorus of green hallelujahs in praise of geothermal, you might want to take a look at a recent New York Times article that points out one little problem with the primary method of extracting geothermal energy: it causes earthquakes.

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I my last post I mentioned Richard Lindzen’s keynote address at the Heartland Institute’s climate change conference. Another talk that I found especially interesting was the one by Gabriel Calzada, an economics professor from King Juan Carlos University in Spain. (Videos of this talk and most of the others are available at the conference website.)

Calzada is the lead author of a study that attacks the myth of economy-boosting “green jobs.” President Obama has cited Spain’s green energy initiatives as a model for the United States to follow. But Calzada and his colleagues argue that the Spanish programs have been an economy-killing disaster, with more than two jobs lost for every “green job” siphoned from the market economy through taxation.

It is completely bizarre for the Obama administration to hold up this job-destroying program as a curative for an economy that’s already on the ropes due to massive government intervention in finance, health care, and energy. If Obama finds any more ways like these to “boost” the economy, it won’t be long before we have no economy left.

I promised I would report back from the Heartland Institute’s Third International Conference on Climate Change in Washington, DC.

The highlight of the conference, for me, was the keynote address by Dr. Richard Lindzen, a leading M.I.T. climate scientist who has long been the most prominent scientific critic of global warming alarmism. (The full text of his talk is available here, along with the rest of the conference proceedings.)

At one point, Lindzen dissected the central argument that the proponents of climate alarm use in attributing the global temperature changes over the past few decades to human activities:

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In my last post, I mentioned I was heading to the Heartland Institute’s Third International Conference on Climate Change in Washington, DC. (I’ll report on the conference soon.)

I had noted the timeliness of the event, given that Congress was working on a bill imposing a cap-and-trade system in the United States (along with a host of other disastrous government interventions), and I expressed hope that the event might “inject a measure of reason into the Congressional debate before the bill comes up for a vote.”

Well, even a measure of reason is probably too much to expect of today’s political bodies. The bill passed in the House last Friday. The bill’s Congressional opponents (some of whom spoke at the Heartland conference) put up a determined fight, and it passed by an extremely narrow margin, 219 to 212, but it passed nevertheless.  

This moves us one step closer to total government control over our production and use of energy, which fuels every aspect of our economy and makes possible the unprecedented quality of life we enjoy today. Even if it were provably true that human activity was causing large-scale changes to the earth’s climate (which it’s not), how is that a justification for undermining industrial civilization by an assault on economic freedom and on the continued development of industrial-scale energy?

With “solutions” like this, who needs problems?