On episode 107 of The Climate Realism Show, we look Earth Day 2024 and how it has been holding up as the poster holiday for the environmental left.
Since it was first started in 1970, dozens of predictions have been announced each Earth Day. For example, April 1970, Population Bomb author Paul Erlich was quoted as saying “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”
Or, this gem. On June 30, 1989, the Associated Press said in an ominous article, “Rising Seas Could Obliterate Nations,” containing a jaw-dropping opener: “A senior UN environmental official (Noel Brown) says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.” Special guest Marc Morano of ClimateDepot.com has been following these predictions for years, and will join us to provide his always interesting color commentary.
Join host Anthony Watts, Marc Marono, and The Heartland Institute’s usual climate crew of H. Sterling Burnett and Linnea Lueken, to talk about these failured predictions and also the Crazy Climate News of the Week. Join us LIVE at 1 p.m. ET (12 p.m. CT) for the kind of climate realism you can’t find anywhere else, and join the chat to get your questions answered, too.
President Joe Biden was out on the stump making an Earth Day speech in Virginia on April 22, and as Fox News reports he was blaming humans for climate change, and the “devastating toll,” he claimed it was wreaking across the nation. He also said anyone who denies this is endangering peoples’ lives. Biden is wrong. Data refutes claims that the weather extremes are worsening amid the modest warming of the past half century. Also those who “believe the science,” as Democrats constantly admonish people to do, know this fact and are trying to prevent climate policies that pose a bigger threat to human welfare than climate change itself.
But folks, despite the overwhelming devastation in red and blue states, there’s still those who deny climate is in crisis. My MAGA Republican friends don’t seem to think it’s a crisis ….I’m not going to go into it now, but I’m not making it up. It’s real. Just listen to what they say. Anyone in or out of government who willfully denies the impacts of climate change is condemning the American people to a very dangerous future, and the world, I might add.
Biden’s mistargeted harangue came shortly after he went through a litany of recent damaging extreme-weather events which he blamed on climate change, including recent wildfires, hurricanes, and floods.
However, a single year’s weather is not climate, which is defined by the World Meteorological Organization as a 30-year trend in weather for a location. And, as discussed in numerous Climate Realism posts, data shows no increasing trend of hurricanes, wildfires, or floods. Nor is there evidence that any of these three types of natural disasters have become more severe or stronger amid the recent slight warming. In fact, what the data for hurricanes shows that there has been a modest decline in tropical cyclone frequency during the recent period of warming and significant decline in global wildfires. The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s most recent assessment report confirms these facts. That’s the science. Biden should believe it.
The President evidently fails to grasp the fact that because climate change isn’t making severe weather more frequent or more powerful, it can’t be causing more harm to people.
Indeed, the data clearly show that fewer people are dying as a result of extreme weather events or extreme temperatures than at any time in history—deaths have declined dramatically even as the Earth has modestly warmed.
While the harm from climate change is declining, by comparison Biden’s climate policies are wreaking havoc with the U.S. economy and peoples lives, jacking up food and energy prices and making it hard for average American’s to get by.
Biden’s pointing his finger at climate realists, who try to publicize these facts, shows him to be nothing more than a befuddled shill for his misguided, tremendously expensive climate policies, pandering to the radical progressive wing of his party, who want to end capitalism and America’s constitutional republic in favor of an oligarchy or kleptocracy, run by political elites. If Biden can’t speak accurately concerning what the science actually shows about climate change, perhaps he should, in the words of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, “remain silent.”
On Earth Day, CFACT took its campaign against Dominion’s offshore wind initiative to new heights – this time by carrying out a protest that featured an airplane flying a banner saying “Save Whales — Stop Dominion Energy” over the boardwalk of Virginia Beach.
The stunt was conducted near the intersection of 31st Street and Atlantic Boulevard, near the famous statue of the Greek God Neptune. Hundreds of onlookers walking up and down the beach took notice and shot pictures, as did local television station WAVY.
The purpose of CFACT’s aerial show was to draw attention to the potentially devastating impact Dominion Energy’s offshore wind project will likely inflict on whales, and in particular, the North Atlantic Right Whale, of which there are less than 350 in existence. The energy company is posed to place a staggering 176 massive wind turbines, over 800 feet tall, right smack in the migratory lanes of the large mammals. CFACT, naturally, opposes this initiative and has launched a lawsuit with a pair of its allies to stop it.
In addition to the aerial stunt, the Committee also treated Virginia Beach residents to other forms of viewing its poignant Earth Day message. One included a large billboard on the main artery leading into town on I-64, and a second involved a roving billboard truck that drove throughout the city throughout the day. Both sported a similar message as the aerial banner and were seen by tens of thousands.
CFACT has long employed the use of street theater to make its voice heard, especially on the issue of saving whales from the impacts of offshore wind. Other CFACT stunts included flying a plane with a banner over Atlantic City, staging a boat protest off Newport, RI, and organizing citizens to form a “whale tail” in Cape May, NJ, in 2023. All of them received generous media coverage.
This is by no means the last renewable energy developers will hear from CFACT. Expect to see more such street theater aimed at exposing their reckless disregard for the environment and property rights in the coming weeks and months ahead.
“The Earth is literally greener, climate-related deaths are down 98%, and 18,000 new species are discovered annually. But radical environmentalists insist Mother Earth is dying and claim we’re perpetuating a climate crisis.” – Gabriella Hoffman
In Episode 430 of District of Conservation, Gabriella debriefs listeners on her recent Conservation Nation film trip to Washington/Oregon, her visit to Mt. Rainier National Park, and how to make Earth Day conservationist again.
In Episode 441 of District of Conservation, Gabriella does a quick roundup on attending the Culpeper Battlefields State Park dedication ceremony, receiving the revamped Field & Stream Magazine, and her thoughts on Rep. Steve Cohen's (D-TN) federal predator contest ban on public lands bill.
SHOW NOTES
Virginia State Parks
Virginia Dept of Conservation and Recreation
American Battlefield Trust: Culpeper Battlefields State Park is Here!
The Future State Park at Culpeper Battlefields
Welcome to Opening Day of the New F&S Print Journal!
Meateater: CONGRESS CONSIDERS NATIONAL BAN ON HUNTING CONTESTS
Cohen: Inhumane practice is neither wildlife management nor sport & Introduced Bill
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Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/district-of-conservation/support
At Quora, Dan Gracia responds to this question: (in italics with my bolds)
Q: Why did people start using the term “climate change” instead of the previous term “global warming”?
I’m 73 now and I remember on April 22, 1970 carrying the totally green American Flag (stars and stripes but in green) at college in a parade celebrating that first Earth Day. Problem then was that we were causing the earth to slip into an ice age dueto the use of fluorocarbons as a propellant in spray cans of all types but the most significant factor was their use in hair spray cans. So it was an “Pending Ice Age Alarm”. Well, of course, that didn’t happen as actual temperatures didn’t sink and actually raised very, very slightly (less than a fraction of a degree over the next 10, or was it 20 years?) .
Then it turned into a “Global Warming Alarm” because there was some evidence of an increase in temperatures, regardless of how minuscule it was. So “Global Warming” is the earliest term most people remember now. Then the warming not only did not fit any of the climate models they were/are basing their alarmist claims on, it stopped warming entirely for about 20-years despite Al Gore’s claims the ice-cap would melt and our coasts would be underwater within 10-years.. And then temperatures sank slightly again.
Figure 1: The measured (symbols on left) and modeled (lines) temperature trends vs. altitude. The Russian model comes closest to the data, and the worst fit is GFDL-CM3, Manabe’s model for which he was awarded a Nobel prize. (Fig. 3 from John R. Christy and Richard T. McNider, DOI:10.1007/s13143-017-0070-z, annotated.)
None of these changes fit any of the computer models that were generating the Alarmist predictions. At that point, instead of trying to find out what variable(s) they were missing, the alarmists finally decided to just call it “climate change”. And now they could blame anything even slightly out of the ordinary as due to climate change. It’s a great catch-all term that you can claim regardless of what the temperatures actually show and also because the global climate is in a almost constant state of change. You’d be a fool to deny climate change because the climate is constantly changing and has been for over 4-billion years now. The trick is proving that human interaction is contributing to it in a meaningful and detrimental way. There are so many more powerful forces at play.
Add to that the fact that the earth was in its most prolific state millions of years ago when the Co2 ratio was much higher. Remember those elementary school science lessons that taught you that plants consume (ingest) Co2 (carbon dioxide) and exhaust O2 (oxygen)? Or perhaps that’s not common knowledge anymore? Plants and trees proliferated because growing conditions were better suited for them.
But regardless of weather getting warmer or colder, climate alarmists are able to blame it all on climate change.
So it’s a catch-all phrase and anyone can chant it for any reason and claim there is a consensus among scientists that this it is a real threat. Unfortunately included in that “consensus” are medical doctors, dentists, Mechanical Engineers, Electrical Engineers, Biologists, Chemists, etc. – basically anyone who has a Bachelor of Science degree or higher. The thing that is missing is a consensus from climatologists. Many of these Bachelor of Science degrees may deal with some fringe parts of the problem but Climatology is an incredibly detailed with ever-changing data field and none of the others have the depth of knowledge to make an accurate claim of cause and effect with enough data and knowledge to make valid predictions.
Would you want a microbiologist to perform open heart surgery on you? Undeniably a scientific background but certainly not enough knowledge and practice to perform a long and complex surgery. Would you look to a Electrical Engineer for that? Definitely a scientist because he/she has at least a bachelor of science degree, ore perhaps a masters or even a doctorate degree. But would you trust that “Doctor” of engineering to perform open-heart surgery on you. Of course not. They don’t have the specialized education, ability to analyze relevant data, or even determine what data was relevant, let alone the fine motor skills needed to successfully complete open heart surgery.
To further muddy the waters, there’s huge amounts of money being spent on climate change research, and if they reach the conclusion that it is not a main ingredient in climate change, that research money dries up and goes away. So actually reaching a provable conclusion whose computer models can be born out with actual evidence instead of speculation, is working towards the elimination of their jobs. Plus, there’s real money to be made outside of climate research projects and grants. There’s the “Carbon TAX”.
Al Gore was one of if not the earliest proponent for “Carbon Credits”. If an industry or installation was generating too much Carbon Dioxide, they would have to purchase the carbon credits to offset their pollution. Ideally this money would then be spent to further other methods of Co2 control. And of course, you would purchase them from Al Gore’s carbon credits company. So then, if the installation had the credits, they could go ahead and continue polluting. As if Al Gore didn’t get enough money from his climate alarmism over the many years he’s been involved this is a Bonanza for him. And how much of that money is actually spent to improve methods and machinery to reduce the carbon levels? How much goes to the top executives of those companies and the people working for them…?
And of course, government has to get in on this cash cow too. A recent carbon tax was imposed on businesses in Washington state. The carbon tax basically requires companies to buy “greenhouse gas allowances,” sold at auction by Washington state, if they emit more than 25,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year. The law took effect on Jan. 1, 2023. The first of 4 “auctions” of “greenhouse gas allowances” raised over $300 million dollars. The remaining 3 auctions for the year are expected to raise at least as much resulting in over $1.2 billion dollars for 2023.
Washington State Senator Ericksen said it best, “This legislation will raise billions of dollars from the people of Washington state. Now, who’s going to pay those billions of dollars? It’s not going to be the oil refineries, it’s not going to be the manufacturers, it’s going to be the people of Washington state who will pay through increased costs for their energy.” Anyone who’s had any experience in business from employee to CEO knows that if a company is to stay in business when their costs increase, they either have to raise their prices or decrease their costs. The first place they go to decrease cost is to chop hours and to let people go. Since it’s an industry-wide expense, they all raise their prices because they all have to do so to stay in business – competition doesn’t have a lot to do with this. If they delay raising their prices, then people lose their jobs instead.
As a result of this carbon tax, energy prices have skyrocketed.Promises were made that it certainly wouldn’t raise the price of gas by more than perhaps 5¢ per gallon because it was a tax on businesses, not a raise in the gas tax. In the first 3-weeks of 2023 it went up 25¢ per gallon and now has exceeded a 50¢ per gallon increase. Pricing of Diesel is even worse. Politicians who have never worked a “real job” for a “real business” don’t have much common sense when it comes to raising taxes.
Energy prices have also risen and continue to rise and since virtually everything moves by truck, that drives up the cost of all goods driving inflation even higher. And of course, now that the government has it, they will never let go of that tax regardless of how it hurts their residents.
So this is a self-perpetuating process originated by well meaning folks who just didn’t have the knowledge or data to back it up.
Absolutely on that first Earth-day in 1970 everyone was concerned for the earth and wanted to find ways to help make it better. Since then it’s become a self-perpetuating scheme with prediction models that have consistently failed over the last 50-years raising alarms which still can’t be proven.
And people seem to forget that Science is not an absolute.What we believe is true today may be disproven tomorrow. THAT is the scientific method regardless of how many people believe in something. At one time virtually all the people in the world believed the earth is flat and the son revolves around the earth. Folks who disagreed were called heretics and persecuted.
The scientific method requires an proposal of what they believes is a reasonable hypothesis that can be proven or disproven. Then through a series of “repeatable” experiments the hypothesis is proven out and published for peer review. If the technique of proving the hypothesis does not generate the same result, then the hypothesis is not proven. Peer review invites dissent, opposing views, and proof of the ability or inability to reach the same result.
NOTE that peer review means scientists who are the peers of those offering the hypothesis with the ability to repeat the experiments used to prove it. You do not solicit or consider the opinion of a medical doctor to a hypothesis put forward by a climatologist, just as you don’t consider the opinion of a climatologist regarding a surgical procedure for a surgeon. Neither are actual peers in the other field of study. They can have opinions, but they are not “peer review”.
As a result I am far more interested in the opinions and research of Dr. Judith Curry and her true peers, than I am of a screaming media darling.
I’m not particularly fond of people who fly in private jets to a meeting where they discuss how to take away my car and feed me bugs . . . but that’s just me.
CFACT’s Marc Morano appeared on One America News Network TV (OAN) to address Time Magazine’s call to make Earth Day a religious holiday.
Paul Greenberg and Carl Safina wrote, “For the two of us environmentalists—one of us nominally Jewish, the other a recovering Catholic—we find the ill-defined nature of the only day honoring the place that makes life itself possible more than a little sacrilegious. So, on this 53rd Earth Day we thought it useful to pose what a real Earth Day should represent and how it could form a central time for a new approach to worship….One day out of 365 to mark the entire planet is too far a cry from the reverence and recognition owed the beleaguered planetary basis for our entire existence, for all known life.”
Morano poked fun at the concept, saying, “The sacred texts will probably be the UN climate reports.”
Once a touchy-feely, consciousness-raising New Age experience, it’s now an occasion for environmental activists to prophesy apocalypse, dish antitechnology dirt, and allow passion and zeal to trump reality.
The first Earth Day celebration, a nationwide environmental teach-in held in 1970, was the brainchild of Democratic Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, who was interested in environmental issues. He recruited Pete McCloskey, a conservation-minded liberal Republican Congressman, to serve as his co-chair, and they enlisted Denis Hayes, a young activist, to be the national coordinator.
In the spirit of the time, it was a touchy-feely, consciousness-raising New Age experience, and most activities were organized at the grassroots level.
Sadly, today’s Earth Day shares much with the current zeitgeist: It reeks of wokeness, political correctness, and virtue-signaling. It has devolved into an occasion for environmental activists to prophesy apocalypse, dish anti-technology dirt, and allow passion and zeal to trump reality.
Many of those stumping for Earth Day on April 22 this year will oppose environment-friendly advances in science and technology, such as agricultural biotechnology (“GMOs”), fracking, and nuclear power. A pervasive meta-message will be disdain for the capitalist system that provides the innovation needed for effective environmental protection and conservation. (It’s no coincidence that low-income countries tend to be the most polluted.)
Ironically, the theme of this year’s event, “Invest In Our Planet,” includes a progressive wish list, including reducing your “foodprint.” For those unfamiliar with this neologism, a foodprint “measures the environmental impacts associated with the growing, producing, transporting, and storing our food— from the natural resources consumed to the pollution produced to the greenhouse gases emitted.”
Another of this year’s event topics is “regenerative agriculture,” a favorite concept of the environmentally woke. But as Andrew Porterfield and Jon Entine of the Genetic Literacy Project have written, “it’s a lot like a rebranding of organic farming but with more grandiose claims…Its supporters in the organic community make a multitude of immodest representations about what organic/regenerative agriculture can do, including ‘reversing global warming’ and ‘ending world hunger,’ along with preserving the world’s topsoil.”
The reality is that regenerative agriculture and its sibling, “agroecology,” promote reliance on primitive, low-yielding agricultural techniques, the use of which raises food prices and disadvantages the poor.
One of this year’s “52 Ways to Invest in Our Planet” is “Go Pesticide Free.” The organizers don’t spell out how, exactly, we should accomplish this, which is hardly surprising, given that 99.99% of the pesticides in our diets are found naturally in our food. (They enable plants to fend off predators and diseases.)
Another of their “tips” is “eat less meat.” Getting into the spirit of this nonsense was New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who said on April 17th, “It is easy to talk about the emissions that’s [sic] coming from buildings and how it impacts our environment, but we now have to talk about beef,” as part of an effort to steer hospital patients toward vegan meals.
“Education” features prominently in Earth Day activities, as in, “Fifty years ago, the first Earth Day started an environmental revolution. Now, we are igniting an education revolution to save the planet. . . Through our Climate and Environmental Literacy Campaign, we will ensure that students across the world benefit from high-quality education to develop into informed and engaged environmental stewards.”
What might that mean? For a previous Earth Day, seventh graders at a tony private school near San Francisco were given an unusual Earth Day assignment: Make a list of environmental projects that could be accomplished with Bill Gates’s fortune. This approach to environmental awareness fits in well with the progressive worldview that the right to private property is subsidiary to undertakings that enlightened thinkers deem worthwhile.
And how interesting that the resources made “available” for the students’ thought experiment were not, say, the aggregate net worth of the members of Congress but the wealth of one of the nation’s most successful and most innovative entrepreneurs.
Another Earth Day assignment for those same students was to read Rachel Carson’s best-selling 1962 book “Silent Spring,” an emotionally charged but deeply flawed excoriation of the widespread spraying of chemical pesticides to control insects. As described by Roger Meiners and Andy Morriss in their scholarly yet eminently readable 2012 analysis, “Silent Spring at 50: Reflections on an Environmental Classic,” Carson exploited her reputation as a well-known nature writer to advocate and legitimatize “positions linked to a darker tradition in American environmental thinking: neo-Malthusian population control and anti-technology efforts.”
Carson’s proselytizing and advocacy led to the virtual banning of DDT and restrictions on other chemical pesticides even though “Silent Spring” was replete with gross misrepresentations and atrocious scholarship. Carson’s observations about DDT were meticulously rebutted point by point by J. Gordon Edwards, a professor of entomology at San Jose State University, a longtime member of the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society, and a fellow of the California Academy of Sciences. In his stunning 1992 essay, “The Lies of Rachel Carson,” Edwards demolished her arguments and assertions and called attention to critical omissions, faulty assumptions, and outright fabrications.
Meiners and Morriss concluded correctly that the influence of “Silent Spring” “encourages some of the most destructive strains within environmentalism: alarmism, technophobia, failure to consider the costs and benefits of alternatives, and the discounting of human well-being around the world.” Sounds a lot like the Earth Day agenda.
One of the United Kingdom’s great contemporary thinkers, Dick Taverne (Lord Taverne of Pimlico), discusses the shortcomings of New Age philosophy in his iconic book, “The March of Unreason.” Taverne deplores the “new kind of fundamentalism” that has infiltrated many environmentalist campaigns as an undiscriminating back-to-nature movement that views science and technology as the enemy and as a manifestation of an exploitative, rapacious and reductionist attitude toward nature. It is no coincidence, he believes, that eco-fundamentalists are strongly represented in anti-globalization and anti-capitalism movements worldwide.
In this, Taverne echoes the late physician and novelist Michael Crichton, who argued in his much-acclaimed novel “State of Fear” that eco-fundamentalists have reinterpreted traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths and turned environmentalism into a kind of religion. This religion has its own Eden and paradise, where mankind lived in a state of grace and unity with nature until mankind’s fall, which came not after eating a forbidden fruit, but after partaking of the forbidden tree of knowledge – that is, technology. This religion also has a judgment day that will come for us in this polluted world – all of us, that is, except for true environmentalists, who will be saved by achieving “sustainability.”
One of Crichton’s characters argues that since the end of the Cold War, environmental alarmism in Western nations has filled the void left by the disappearance of the terror of communism and nuclear holocaust and that social control is now maintained by highly exaggerated fears about pollution, global warming, chemicals, genetic engineering, and the like. With the military-industrial complex no longer the primary driver of society, the politico-legal-media complex has replaced it.
This cabal peddles fear in the guise of promoting safety. French writer and philosopher Pascal Bruckner captured its tone nicely: “You’ll get what you’ve got coming! That is the death wish that our misanthropes address to us. These are not great souls who alert us to troubles but tiny minds who wish us suffering if we have the presumption to refuse to listen to them. Catastrophe is not their fear but their joy.”
The small-minded misanthropes have enjoyed some dubious “successes.” They have effectively banished agricultural biotechnology from Europe and much of Africa, put the chemical industry on the run and placed the pharmaceutical industry in their crosshairs.
Lord Taverne believes these are ominous trends that are contrary to the principles of the Enlightenment, returning us to an era in which inherited dogma and superstition took precedence over experimental data. Eco-fundamentalism strangles scientific creativity and technological innovation, blocking the availability of products that, used responsibly, could dramatically improve and extend many lives and protect the environment.
Lord Taverne posited that when you defend science and reason, you defend democracy itself. Well said, Milord, and happy Earth Day to you.
“Steve Milloy, a senior fellow at the Energy and Environment Legal Institute who sits on Heartland’s board of directors, told The Post the ad campaign reveals how ‘Orwellian’ government action on the environment has become. ‘As the Biden administration is literally permitting the offshore wind industry to kill endangered whales under the guise of ‘saving the planet,’ Earth Day has gone 180 degrees from where it started and has become truly Orwellian,’” Milloy said. New York Post coverage Web | PDF.
Earth Day falls on April 22 — Lenin’s birthday, appropriately enough — so let us first recall the blessed memory of the official theme for Earth Day 2022: “Invest In Our PlanetTM.” “This is the moment to change it all — the business climate, the political climate, and how we take action on climate. It’s going to take all of us. All in. Businesses, governments, and citizens — everyone accounted for, and everyone accountable. A partnership for the planet.”
Put aside the profound totalitarian implications of the “change it all” exhortation; suffice it to say that centralized attempts in the past to change everything uniformly have engendered mass murder by governments and attendant economic, environmental, and moral destruction. Focus instead on the official theme for Earth Day 2023: “Invest In Our PlanetTM.”
No, that is not a copy-and-paste error. Last year’s Earth Day slogan is this year’s Earth Day slogan. Given the shameless groveling by a long queue of corporate officials and public relations gasbags desperate to advertise their environmental bona fides so that the green alligators might eat them last, one would think that the massive financial support from the corporate boardrooms for the Earth Day charlatans might have financed a contract with a PR firm to come up with something new.
And one would be wrong. The basic imperatives of the Earth Day environmental left are eternal, immutable, unchanging, impervious to evidence, and utterly mindless. “Ensure that students across the worldbenefit from high-quality education to develop into informed and engaged environmental stewards.” Translation: Propagandize the young, Komsomol-style. “Sign the petition for a global plastics treaty.” Over three-quarters of ocean plastic pollution is discharged from rivers in Asia and other less-developed regions. (Your plastic straw is irrelevant.) Needless to say, the Earth Day proponents have not bothered to tell us how those governments can be induced to make the attendant massive changes; bribing them will not work because the western governments will prove curiously parsimonious, as the travails of the Green Climate Fund (part of the thunderously-applauded Paris Agreement) make clear.
And on and on. “Plant trees.” Yes, trees absorb carbon dioxide, but because forest canopies for the most part are dark, forest expansion would reduce albedo (reflective) effects, and the net impact is likely to be a smallwarming. Oops. As an aside, there are important benefits from mild warming, among them reduced mortality, planetary greening, and an increase in agricultural productivity. “Vote Earth,” by which the Earth Day campaign means “send us your contact information so that we can ask you for money.” “Global Cleanup,” the local neighborhood version of the crusade against plastics, except that the neighborhood mobilizations might actually yield some small measure of waste removal, presumably to be taken to local landfills, ironically not a favored outcome for the environmental left.
My favorite among the Earth Day 2023 nostrums is “Sustainable Fashion”: “Behind every piece of clothing in a store, there is an industry stripping the Earth of its limited resources and exploiting the labor force that works in its garment factories. Tremendous waste characterizes this industry as it depletes healthy soil, contaminates fresh water sources, pollutes the air we breathe, defiles our oceans, destroys forests and damages eco-systems and the health of their biodiversity.”
Wow. Who knew that blouses, blue jeans, and bras are mass murderers? And in the circular argument department, one floor up from the clothing aisles, Earth Day 2023 informs us that “In order for true recycling to take place, clothing must be collected, sorted and distributed to recyclers.” Do Earth Day staffers actually receive salaries to come up with such drivel? One wonders why the Earth Day proponents do not simply argue for a return to the pre-serpent nakedness of the Garden of Eden. After all, would that not eliminate a vast source of “unsustainability,” whatever that means?
Let me be blunt: The Earth Day initiatives are destructive silliness, a form of mass hysteria, and utterly unsubtle. It can surprise no one that the Earth Day propagandists now scream that “CLIMATE ACTION IS NOW THE BEST PATHWAY TO A STRONG ECONOMY.”
Oh, dear. One wonders why “climate action” requires massive subsidies and economic upheaval. The Earth Day proponents assert that “The cost of renewable energy has plummeted in the last decade,” but even if true (adeeplyproblematicpremise) it is irrelevant in that the appropriate comparison is with the costs of conventional energy and electricity generation, and with the costs of renewables when combined with the costs of backup generation required to avoid constant service interruptions. Example: The cost of onshore wind power including backup capacity is four times greater than that of gas-fired electricity. Earth to Earth Day: There are enormous engineering and reliability problems inherent in wind and solar power, which cannot be wished away.
The cost realities for electric and hybrid plug-in vehicles yield the same conclusion: Unconventional (that is, expensive) energy is uncompetitive. Accordingly, the “climate action/strong economy” assertion is propaganda: Radically higher energy costs cannot engender economic wellbeing. Even the International Energy Agency — far from immune to the political pressures exerted by fashionable opinion and the environmental left — in its latest World Energy Outlook projects that by 2050 global oil consumption will be about equal to that in 2015, coal consumption about equal to that in 2010, and natural gas consumption higher than that in 2020. If we assume annual real GDP growth of only 1 percent, global GDP in 2050 will be a third higher than now. Trust me: The IEA projections will prove vastly too low.
But the Earth Day beat goes on. Many billions of people are little more than environmentally destructive mouths to feed, without moral standing and devoid of the ingenuity, intelligence, and inventiveness to solve problems. They are, therefore, environmental sinners, and only massive economic destruction and impoverishment can redeem mankind. And just as the pagans for millennia attempted to prevent destructive weather by worshipping golden idols, so now does the Earth Day congregation attempt to prevent environmental Armageddon by bowing down before recycling bins.
The Earth Day revision of the Old Testament might read: “In the Beginning, Earth was the Garden of Eden. But Mankind, having consumed the Forbidden Fruit of the Tree of Technological Knowledge, has despoiled it. And only through repentance and widespread suffering can we return to the loving embrace of Mother Gaia.” Dogbert’s version is pithier: “You can’t save the earth unless you’re willing to make other people sacrifice.” Truer words were never spoken.
Ed. Note: April 22nd (tomorrow) has been celebrated since 1970 as Earth Day. However, this day needs an update by the simple addition of one word: Resourceful Earth Day. Human ingenuity has proven in the last 53 years that optimist/realist Julian Simon was right and the neo-Malthusians were wrong on the human condition and its prospects. This suggestion, and tribute to Simon, by the founder and longtime head of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), Fred Smith, remains as relevant as when it was published in 1999.
April 22, once associated with the optimism of revolutionary Marxism (as the birthday of Lenin) and then with the pessimism of modern Malthusianism (environmentalist’s Earth Day since 1970), merits redemption.
A new label, Resourceful Earth Day, is appropriate as we enter the 21st century, a title selected to honor mankind’s increasing ability to solve environmental as well as economic problems.
This title, of course, is inspired by the late Julian Simon, author of “The Resourceful Earth,” who combated with passion and power those who viewed man as the cancer of this planet and his future as bleak and austere.
Resourceful Earth Day also signals a hope more appropriate to spring, marking a return to a positive view of man’s role on this planet. Indeed the old Marxists, convinced that they would dominate the future, optimistically favored economic and technological change. The forces of change, they believed, would move man toward heaven here on Earth.
That optimistic element has disappeared. The environmental establishment has grown increasingly gloomy, convinced that the Earth is suffering from the “Terrible Toos” — too many people, too much consumption, too great a reliance on technology which is understood too little. Earth Day has become a day of atonement for man’s criminal assault on our planet. That pessimism reflects, in part, their realization that history is no longer on their side; thus, change is no longer in their interest. Stasis must be the order of the day.
With attacks on things like biotechnology, automobiles, suburban opportunity and trade, they now seek only, as Aaron Wildavsky noted, “an egalitarian society based on rejection of economic growth in favor of a smaller population eating lower on the food chain, consuming a lot less, and sharing a much lower level of resources much more equally.”
Had God not expelled man from the Garden of Eden, so the story goes, the “greens” certainly would have. And, indeed, their ideal land use is “wilderness,” defined as an area from which man is excluded.
Simon was a wonderful critic of all this foolishness. He investigated and refuted the gloomy projections that Western Civilization was a failure, that our civilization was non-sustainable and doomed to inevitable decline as the planet’s finite resources were depleted.
But the finite nature of the Earth’s material resources pose no great problem, he argued, because the Earth’s most precious resource is infinite and organic. It is its people, contributing to the ever-growing stock of useful human knowledge. When people have been free to apply their intellect, they have always found ways to meet needs and answer crises, and always will.
Simon pointed out that, while people are born with stomachs, they are born with brains and hands as well. The latter allow them to create far more than they consume. People, after all, are not ciphers, which helps explain how the growth in the world’s food supply has outstripped the growth in the world’s population.
The problems of famine, overpopulation, poverty and disease are resolvable. In fact, they have been resolved in the United States and other places where human ingenuity is free to solve them. The calamity criers of the green movement predicted great disasters afflicting the planet by the year 2000. The Carter administration’s Global 2000 Report forecast global calamity, and Paul Ehrlich claimed on the “Johnny Carson Show,” “If I were a gambler, I would bet even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”
Unfortunately for the eco-catastrophists, as we approach their due date for disaster, the planet is in increasingly good shape. This point was recently conceded by America’s arch-druid. “Not only do we have the healthiest economy in a generation,” said Vice President Al Gore, “we also have the cleanest environment.”
On this Resourceful Earth Day, we may hope that Gore and his fellow foot soldiers in the environmental brigades will ponder these points and rethink the wisdom of the current policy of placing all one’s faith in federal political solutions. The greens’ constant calls for massive government controls, forced population limits, harsh curbs on economic activity, and a curtailing of technology threaten to produce exactly the results that such actions seek to avoid —a world of ecological and economic disaster. On this April 22, let us commit to both a freer and a cleaner world; they go together after all.
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Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
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