Blog

Yesterday’s excerpt from Energy & Climate Wars showed why increasing energy consumption in poor nations is essential for any quality of life improvements. In today’s post from Clearing the Air: The Real Story of the War on Air Pollution, Indur Goklany argues that the United States’ economic gains improved not only their wealth, but also their environment, and primarily without government intervention.

Clearing the Air was published in 1999

The real engines for progress on the urban smoke problem in the United States as well as in England were economics and technological change—forces that began in the late 19^thcentury and have continued, for one reason or another, to the present day. New, cleaner energy sources such as natural gas, oil, and electricity became increasingly available as substitutes for coal and wood in homes, businesses, and industries. Urbanization, while responsible for many environmental woes, accelerated the process of substitution because higher population densities reduced access to wood and increased cost-effectiveness and economics of distribution systems for natural gas and electricity.

New technologies entered the marketplace that increased the efficiency of all types of combustion equipment, reducing the amount of soot produced and fuel burned for a given amount of usable energy. Those technologies included more efficient and cleaner furnaces and boilers for homes, businesses, industries, and power plants. In some places, underground and street railroads powered by steam were electrified; in others, electrification replaced horse-powered street cars, reducing another, but no less real, form of pollution. The automobile, which would later be viewed as an environmental villain, was still a relatively little-used luxury; in 1910 there were two automobile registrations for every 100 households. In fact, the use of motor vehicles in urban areas served as environmental purpose by reducing the horse population and associated wastes, as did the electrification of street railways.

The realization that smoke signified unburnt fuel led industry, railroads, and even households to make efforts to reduce it. It was thought to be not only good economics but also good citizenship. That notion was clearly incorporated in the Ohio statute, which allowed municipal authorities to “compel the consumption of smoke.” In time, even the Great War would be pressed into service against this foe; as the Pittsburgh Bureau of Smoke Regulation exhorted, “it must never be forgotten that loss of black smoke means loss of heat and that every unit of heat thrown away is so much aid given to the enemy.” On the other hand, the Bureau of Mines, part of the U.S. Department of Interior, suspended  its smoke abatement “campaign” during the war years. At the other extreme in Milwaukee, the war was used as justification to go, literally, full steam ahead; as a result, “smoky” days increased from 47 in 1916 to 212 in 1918.

[click to continue…]

A recent article in the Huffington Post written by David Foster calls for a higher standard for the jobs created in the United States; if they’re not green, they’re not good enough.  Foster writes:

On Friday, the Labor Department announced that the American economy had gained about120,000 jobs in November. A positive number is a good number. But we have to face facts: we aren’t going to put eight million people back to work with a piecemeal approach to our economy. It’s no longer acceptable to sit on the sidelines and hope that jobs will be created and that our economy will recover by returning to an unsustainable pre-2008 economic model. It’s no longer an option to deny the impact of climate change on our economy. We need action to build the industries that will drive our future economy in the United States, and we need it now.

In Durban this week, thousands of people from around the world are gathering to advocate for an agreement that will avert the worst impacts of climate change and help impacted nations adapt. Whether in South Africa or in the United States, the cost of climate change is deep and far reaching. It’s costing us money. It’s costing us economic growth. And it’s costing us jobs.

Foster’s unsettling statements, though elitist and alarmist, are unfortunately vivid in the design of the current administration’s biased behavior.  While federal agencies under the Obama administration have supported industries that create the chic new-wave “green jobs,” other jobs are treated as inferior within industries that are “unsustainable.”  The obvious targets are the gas and oil industry (i.e. the punting of the Keystone pipeline, hostility towards hydraulic fracturing, “quitting coal” initiatives).  However, these jobs that lack environmental sex appeal actually provide sustainable incomes and benefits for the masses.  The Wall Street Journal reported an 80% increase from 2003 in the jobs of the oil and gas production, now employing some 440,000 workers. These jobs account for more than one in five of all net new private jobs in that period (Wall Street Journal).  The Journal also details North Dakota—the state with the lowest unemployment rate (3.5%)—as having more than 16,000 current job openings in the oil and gas industry, and places like Williston having available jobs that often pay more than $100,000 a year.

[click to continue…]

In this excerpt from Energy and Climate Wars: How naïve politicians, green ideologues and media elites are undermining the truth about energy and climate, Peter Glover and Michael Economides explain why energy consumption is the ultimate good and why governments shouldn’t prevent increased energy use. As they write, “energy demand is the cause of US wealth.”

Energy and Climate Wars was released in 2011

Without modern energy Western civilization would grind to a halt, literally. Your refrigerator would no longer keep cheap food chilled for weeks and months; you would need fresh food daily, with all the extra costs and the journeys that entails. Private cars would be obsolete. You would have to read by candlelight. Your home would have to be heated by burning wood or, if you had a local source of hydrocarbon fuels—what we call primary—burning oil, gas, or coal. In short, you would be subject to the technology of the mid-nineteenth century.

At this point, an extreme idealist may naively insist that life was better in former generations than today. A less extreme idealist may claim that hydrocarbon fuels are no longer necessary and that we could switch, with the right social and political will, to alternative energy sources. The argument runs that, if only we could divest ourselves of our “addiction” to oil, gas, and coal (“fossil” fuels) we could, at a stroke, clean up our environment by making a wholehearted commitment to renewable, clean and “free” energy, wind, wave, hydro, solar, and geothermal power to solve our future energy needs. Only one problem with that: there’s more chance of Donald Duck becoming president of the United States.

Just try to make that particular energy switchover and stand back and watch the lights go out all over the world. True, some radicals want it that way. They think it would be “quaint” to return to dark ages lifestyle, the same “quaint,” often poverty-stricken, lifestyles to which they would doom other societies who today are desperate to industrialize, as the West has. This is an easy pastime, of course, when you are an armchair eco-liberal enjoying the fruits of a post-industrial society.

[click to continue…]

Climate scare-mongers love to hide behind the alleged scientific “consensus” that man-made carbon emissions are an imminent threat to the planet.  But to paraphrase Bertrand Russell, the number of scientists who believe a theory is irrelevant to its truth.  In fact, scientific consensuses have a long history of coming to ignoble ends, as I discuss in my column for the Washington Examiner today:

Once it was the unshakable belief of experts that the Sun revolved around the Earth.

This Ptolemaic model of the solar system, so-called after the 2nd century A.D. Roman astronomer who cemented the hypothesis in the Western mind, was for centuries considered so obvious and uncontroversial that to even suggest otherwise was to be accused of insanity, stupidity or heresy.

[click to continue…]

Following the failure in Copenhagen and Cancun, no one expected much from the UN’s seventeenth year of climate talks that took place during the past two weeks in South Africa. However, the sluggish conference got a jolt of excitement when China teased that they might agree, after sixteen years of disagreement, to sign a legally binding deal for reducing emissions.

China’s softening position escalated enthusiasm at the United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP17) with news coming out stating that negotiators “were steps closer to an agreement on combating climate change” and “Agreement on emissions reduction appears near.”

COP17, according to The Economist, was “more about saving the circus” than “saving the planet.” Regarding the event, the Wall Street Journal declared that it “appeared destined to end as a well-advertised convention of environmental officials and activists swapping strategies on creating new national parks and shuttering old coal-fired plants.” But that was before China’s changing rhetoric—and rhetoric it was.

[click to continue…]

“To maintain our Nation’s competitive edge,” President Obama said this summer, “we must ensure that the United States has fast, reliable ways to move people, goods, energy, and information. In a global economy, where businesses are making investment choices between countries, we will compete for the world’s investments based in part on the quality of our infrastructure.” The president is absolutely right, and yet his environmental zeal stands in the way of American infrastructure growth.

At a news conference with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper yesterday, Obama told reporters that he would reject any Congressional deal that tied a payroll tax cut—something he has pushed for over the past couple months—to an approval for Canada’s Keystone XL, a 1700 mile pipeline that would deliver up to 830,000 barrels of oil a day from the Alberta tar sands to America’s refining hub along the Gulf of Mexico.

“Any effort to try to tie Keystone to the payroll tax cut, I will reject. Everybody should be on notice. The reason is,” he explained, “because the payroll tax cut is something House Republicans and Senate Republicans should want to do regardless of any other issues.” In other words, it’s his way or no way.

The logic behind the payroll tax cuts, as explained by Obama, is that “it will spur spending.  It will spur hiring.” Yet the pipeline will create $7 billion in investment and will create upwards of 13,000 private sector jobs without spending a single public dollar. In tough budgetary times, Congress and the president should be open ways to create jobs without more debt-financed stimulus.

[click to continue…]