environmentalism — VOICES for REASON

On Earth Day, we’re told that we should take stock of our impact on our environment. The assumption, of course, is that it’s bad—that we are, to use the common phrase “destroying the planet.”

On this month’s Power Hour—my podcast/Internet-radio-show on energy issues—I bring in philosopher Dr. Onkar Ghate, a senior colleague of mine at the Ayn Rand Center, to question this assumption, and many other assumptions about the relationship between human beings in our environment. Dr. Ghate discusses everything from the political, philosophical, and religious origins of modern environmentalists (the leaders of Earth Day) to the Japanese nuclear situation to how industrialization has positively impacted our environment to the danger of “moderate” environmentalist policies.

I’ve read a lot about environmentalism over the years, and I sincerely believe that Dr. Ghate’s explanations in this podcast are some of the best, clearest explanations of environmental issues available anywhere. Make sure you listen to this interview at least once before Earth Day.

For more information on Power Hour, as well as other commentary on energy issues subscribe to my newsletter “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Energy” by sending an email.

Download “Power Hour with Alex Epstein,” Episode 3: Onkar Ghate

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The Ayn Rand Center (ARC) along with the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) invite you to celebrate industrial civilization and defend the energy that makes it possible during “Human Achievement Hour” this Saturday at 8:30 p.m. EST.

The event coincides with “Earth Hour,” which encourages people worldwide to turn off their lights as a protest against carbon emissions. During “Human Achievement Hour,” we encourage you to leave your lights on and fully enjoy the benefits of industrial civilization made possible by burning fossil fuels. Beginning at 8 p.m. EST, CEI is hosting a celebration at its offices in Washington D.C. and via livestream.

Back in 2009, ARC fellow Keith Lockitch explained the importance of standing against the “Earth Hour” campaign:

Politicians and environmentalists, including those behind Earth Hour, are not calling on people just to change a few light bulbs, they are calling for a truly massive reduction in carbon emissions—as much as 80 percent below 1990 levels. Because our energy is overwhelmingly carbon-based (fossil fuels provide more than 80 percent of world energy), and because the claims of abundant “green energy” from breezes and sunbeams are a myth—this necessarily means a massive reduction in our energy use.

People don’t have a clear view of what this would mean in practice. We, in the industrialized world, take our abundant energy for granted and don’t consider just how much we benefit from its use in every minute of every day. Driving our cars to work and school, sitting in our lighted, heated homes and offices, powering our computers and countless other labor-saving appliances, we count on the indispensable values that industrial energy makes possible: hospitals and grocery stores, factories and farms, international travel and global telecommunications. It is hard for us to project the degree of sacrifice and harm that proposed climate policies would force upon us.

This blindness to the vital importance of energy is precisely what Earth Hour exploits. It sends the comforting-but-false message: Cutting off fossil fuels would be easy and even fun! People spend the hour stargazing and holding torch-lit beach parties; restaurants offer special candle-lit dinners. Earth Hour makes the renunciation of energy seem like a big party.

Participants spend an enjoyable sixty minutes in the dark, safe in the knowledge that the life-saving benefits of industrial civilization are just a light switch away. This bears no relation whatsoever to what life would actually be like under the sort of draconian carbon-reduction policies that climate activists are demanding: punishing carbon taxes, severe emissions caps, outright bans on the construction of power plants.

Forget one measly hour with just the lights off. How about Earth Month, without any form of fossil fuel energy? Try spending a month shivering in the dark without heating, electricity, refrigeration; without power plants or generators; without any of the labor-saving, time-saving, and therefore life-saving products that industrial energy makes possible.

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A common argument for “green” controls on the economy is that they are needed to promote “energy efficiency.” They aren’t–not in any rational sense of the term. All other things being equal, if the producer of, say, a washing machine can provide the same quality wash using less energy, the company will save its customers money and gain more buyers.

A recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, “How Washington Ruined Your Washing Machine,” reveals that “energy efficiency” controls on washing machines do not promote energy efficiency–they promote energy deficiency: using less energy and getting worse results.

It might not have been the most stylish, but for decades the top-loading laundry machine was the most affordable and dependable. Now it’s ruined—and Americans have politics to thank.

In 1996, top-loaders were pretty much the only type of washer around, and they were uniformly high quality. When Consumer Reports tested 18 models, 13 were “excellent” and five were “very good.” By 2007, though, not one was excellent and seven out of 21 were “fair” or “poor.” This month came the death knell: Consumer Reports simply dismissed all conventional top-loaders as “often mediocre or worse.”

How’s that for progress?

The culprit is the federal government’s obsession with energy efficiency. Efficiency standards for washing machines aren’t as well-known as those for light bulbs, which will effectively prohibit 100-watt incandescent bulbs next year. Nor are they the butt of jokes as low-flow toilets are. But in their quiet destruction of a highly affordable, perfectly satisfactory appliance, washer standards demonstrate the harmfulness of the ever-growing body of efficiency mandates.

Next time someone tells you the government is needed to promote “energy efficiency,” remember these “efficient” washers that, as Kazman says, are “expensive” and “often have mold problems.”

Image: Wikimedia Commons

A recent New York Times op-ed floats the following trial balloon: force companies to label products and services with the amount of energy–especially oil–that goes into making them, so that we will reduce energy consumption just as we allegedly reduce calorie consumption based on mandatory food labels. (For what’s wrong with mandatory food labels, read this post by Don Watkins.) The author, Amanda Little, seems positively giddy at the idea of a “Decal” that would guilt Americans into using less energy, and perhaps into being primed for mandatory energy reductions.

Once Decal took hold, the Department of Energy could recommend daily energy allowances, in the same way the Department of Agriculture recommends daily intakes of different nutrients. Experts could offer “diet” plans for energy-efficient lifestyles, and the Internal Revenue Service could offer tax rebates to families that achieve certain energy-calorie reductions.

The whole food-calories/energy analogy is horrible. As human beings, food calories are something we can only healthily consume so much of. But there is no such limit when it comes to energy and machines. Energy is the capacity to do work–a potentially unlimited value; the more energy we use, the more productive we can be, and the more options we have to enjoy life (e.g., more travel).

Image: Wikimedia Commons

“The most important and most overlooked energy issue today,” I wrote in “Energy at the Speed of Thought,” “is the growing crisis of global energy supply. Cheap, industrial-scale energy is essential to building, transporting, and operating everything we use, from refrigerators to Internet server farms to hospitals. It is desperately needed in the undeveloped world, where 1.6 billion people lack electricity, which contributes to untold suffering and death. And it is needed in ever-greater, more-affordable quantities in the industrialized world: Energy usage and standard of living are directly correlated.”

In a recent post on Master Resource, Donald Hertzmark elaborates on this point. Hertzmark gives many valuable facts and figures about the degree of “energy squalor” that exists in the world, but to me the most powerful part was this image–a picture of the entire world at night, revealing which parts of the world (such as North America) are alight with plentiful energy, and which parts (such as much of Africa) are dark with energy poverty. Remember that image next time you hear that the whole world needs to drastically cut its usage of practical forms of energy (coal, oil, natural gas).

My colleague Dr. Keith Lockitch recently spoke at the Fourth International Conference on Climate Change, held in Chicago, IL. The title of his talk was “The Roots of Climate Alarmism.” To view the video, follow this link, then scroll down to find the title slide for Keith’s talk.

In a new editorial published on foxnews.com, Alex Epstein writes:

This Earth Day, Obama renewed his call for “comprehensive energy and climate legislation that will safeguard our planet, spur innovation and allow us to compete and win in the 21st century economy.” In lockstep with environmentalists, Obama has previously said the ultimate goal of legislation is “a hard cap on all carbon emissions at a level that scientists say is necessary to curb global warming–an 80% reduction by 2050.”

But this raises the question: What is going to replace the coal, oil, and natural gas that we use to heat our homes and offices, fuel our cars and airplanes, power up our computers, and light up the night? [Read the whole thing.]

Keith Lockitch is quoted in a National Geographic article on the history and meaning of Earth Day. He touches on the anti-capitalist ideas behind the environmentalist movement.

[update] On PajamasMedia.com, Alex writes: “This Earth Day, take a moment to thank the Greens’ biggest punching bag: Big Oil.” Read the whole post. Alex also appears with Keith Lockitch to discuss Earth Day on PJTV’s Front Page here and here.

For a unique perspective on the history, science, economics, and philosophy behind Earth Day, check out the resources listed in the post Cancel Earth Day, Stop Green Guilt.  And if you missed the Earth Day interview with Onkar Ghate and Keith Lockitch, here’s Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

image: barunpatro

We are told that Earth Day is about enjoying nature, anticipating exciting green technologies, and promoting human health. It isn’t. It is about guilt for the very thing that makes enjoyment, technology, and health possible–our industrial, capitalist way of life. When environmentalists tell us to be “green” on Earth Day by turning out our lights, hand-washing our clothes, and not using our cars, they are saying that what we do every other day of the year is wrong–that it is destructive and “unsustainable.”

At the Ayn Rand Center, we believe that industrial life is something to be proud of and something billions around the globe desperately need to emulate. We condemn the 40 years of apocalyptic, pseudo-scientific environmentalist predictions–such as environmentalist hero Paul Ehrlich’s prediction that hundreds of millions of people would starve by 1980. We recognize the ability of free minds and free markets to make human life better and better, no matter what nature throws at us.

For a unique perspective on the history, science, economics, and philosophy behind Earth Day, we invite you to explore the following resources.

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Following the Climategate scandal, I commented that on the climate issue “there has been a consistent pattern of exaggeration and deception, of context-dropping claims, and of distortion of the facts and the scientific process”—and that this has been driven by “a widespread commitment to environmentalist ideology.”

Well since Climategate, there have been so many other scientific scandals that have emerged it’s hard to keep up with them all. As the Wall Street Journal put it:

It has been a bad—make that dreadful—few weeks for what used to be called the “settled science” of global warming, and especially for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that is supposed to be its gold standard.

First it turns out that the Himalayan glaciers are not going to melt anytime soon, notwithstanding dire U.N. predictions. Next came news that an IPCC claim that global warming could destroy 40% of the Amazon was based on a report by an environmental pressure group. Other IPCC sources of scholarly note have included a mountaineering magazine and a student paper.

Here’s a round-up of the growing list of scientific distortions from the Orange County Register’s Mark Landsbaum.  So much for “The debate is over.”

Photo credit: flickr/azrainman

Did you see the “Green Police” Super Bowl ad? There’s some debate about whether the commercial is mocking the green movement, but I think blogger David Roberts makes a pretty good case that it isn’t:

[The ad is aimed] at people who acknowledge the moral authority of the green police–people who may find those obligations tiresome and constraining on occasion, who only fitfully meet them, who may be annoyed by sticklers and naggers, but who recognize that living more sustainably is in fact the moral thing to do. This basically describes every guy I know.

Of course, it’s not exactly reassuring that so many Americans don’t mind being bossed around in the name of environmentalism. Have Americans gone from the Revolutionary-era ethos of “Don’t tread on me” to “Only tread on me if it’s for a good cause”?

Here’s ARC’s Keith Lockitch on why we should not acknowledge the moral authority of the green police.

image: stock.xchng/Plusverde