Science & 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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image: sxc.hu

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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

On the latest episode of Power Hour—the monthly Internet radio show where I interview today’s top energy experts to discuss today’s top energy issues—I talk to Michael Lynch, President of Strategic Energy & Economic Research, about the widespread theory of Peak Oil: the idea that the world faces an inevitable, imminent, and disastrous decline in oil production.

Here are a few of the many topics we covered:

• The most popular arguments for Peak Oil—do they add up?
• What is the future of oil production around the world?
• Why people keep confidently predicting “peak oil,” even though such predictions have been failing for decades.
• The overlooked role of politics and economics in determining rises and falls in oil production.

Download “Power Hour with Alex Epstein,” Episode 2: Michael Lynch

Subscribe to “Power Hour with Alex Epstein” on iTunes

In a State of the Union Address that purported to take energy issues seriously, President Obama took an ominous tone toward an indispensable form of energy: oil. Oil is the lifeblood of our economy, the fuel of our engines, the material of our petroleum products—and it is extremely difficult to substitute for.

And yet President Obama bashed oil as ‘yesterday’s energy,’ claiming that much of it can be replaced by biofuels, solar, and wind, if only Americans would consent to subsidizing them even more (they already get upwards of 100 times the subsidy that oil does).

This claim is completely baseless—and, at a time when oil prices are rising and Obama has already clamped down on drilling, incredibly dangerous. Oil cannot be dismissed as “yesterday’s energy,” for it is the energy of the present and will be crucial for the foreseeable future. In attacking oil, the President is not helping our energy future—he is making it far more bleak.

I am thrilled to announce the debut of my new monthly Internet-radio-show/podcast, “Power Hour”—an interview show that brings in today’s top energy experts to break down today’s top energy issues. With in-depth interviews of experts on controversies such as “green energy,” offshore drilling, “energy independence,” fossil fuels, etc, “Power Hour” seeks to help listeners get clear on these complex but vital issues.

One of the themes of the show will be the crucial, life-and-death importance of understanding energy and energy policy. The amount of energy human beings can harness from nature is directly correlated to standard of living; where energy production abounds, life abounds–where energy production is stifled or absent, life is shorter and suffering is rampant. It is therefore imperative that our government pursue the proper policies with regard to energy, and that we know what those are; as one of the refrains in the show goes: “Power Hour: Because what you don’t know about energy can kill you.”

The first episode of Power Hour features an extended discussion with Robert Bryce, author of the popular energy books Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of Energy Independence and Power Hungry: The Myths of “Green” Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future. The interview focuses on the crucial importance of power in human life, and the inability of “green” energy and “energy independence” to supply that power. Check it out! Comments welcome.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Download “Power Hour with Alex Epstein,” Episode 1: Robert Bryce

Subscribe to “Power Hour with Alex Epstein” on iTunes

Wind power is the most common form of “green” energy in the world (largely because it is cheaper than solar). Great Britain in particular has hitched its future to wind power. Recently, they’ve experienced one of the fundamental and obvious problems with wind in particularly severe form–the “intermittency problem,” i.e., that wind does not blow consistently and thus cannot be counted on.

As Briton Tom Mcghie writes in The Daily Mail,

In the last quarter ending December 23, wind turbines produced on average 8.6 per cent of our electricity, but the moment the latest bad weather arrived with snow and freezing temperatures, this figure fell to as low as 1.8 per cent.The slack was immediately taken up by efficient, but dirty, coal-fired power stations and oil-fired plants.

‘What is so worrying is that these sort of figures are not a one off,’ said Mr Nicholson. ‘It was exactly the same last January and February when high pressure brought freezing cold temperatures, snow and no wind.’

In fact last year, the failure of wind power to produce electricity was even more profound.

Then, over a few days, the lack of wind meant that only 0.2 per cent of a possible five per cent of the UK’s energy was generated by wind turbines.

Remember this next time Barack Obama or Thomas L. Friedman bemoans that we are “behind” Europe in “green energy.”

Image: Wikimedia Commons

With a new year approaching, we looked back at some of the topics we discussed on VFR since the blog was launched. Here, we highlight a few of our favorite VFR posts that you may enjoy revisiting (or reading for the first time, if you’re a new reader).

Posts by Keith Lockitch.

• Green central planning—our hydrogen future?
• Climategate: a green conspiracy?
• Green energy: neither free nor forever

Image: flickr/Ahorcado

On this blog, I have repeatedly stressed the inferiority of solar and wind energy due, in large part, to the fact that both are dilute and intermittent, making them expensive and unreliable to harness. For a look at what real energy–that is, concentrated, controllable energy that can provide large amounts of power on demand–looks like, check out this amazing clip of a 25,000 ton nuclear ship plowing through thick Arctic ice. (HT Atomic Insights Blog.)