Earth Day is upon us yet again, and it is difficult not to notice its transformation into a vehicle for corporate virtue signaling: Full-page ads in national and local print media, yielding a revenue stream for which the newspapers and magazines are sincerely grateful. Advertisements on broadcast media and heavily trafficked websites. Booths at ubiquitous Earth Day events. Participation in conferences, teach-ins, community events, marches, lectures, and the other myriad types of gatherings at which elites and ordinary Joes and Joannes—and their children, grandchildren, and pets—can show they are one with enlightened opinion. Press releases from the PR departments expressing deep concern about the environmental cause du jour, and messages from the chairmen and CEOs making it very clear that their companies care deeply about the environment, a top priority for investment and planning.

People hold up inflatable world globes during World Environment Day celebrations in central Sydney June 5, 2009. Reuters

This Earth Day parade of corporate logos has been going on for decades, and it is unsurprising that endless repetition leads the suits to believe their propaganda, and thus the companies to an orientation toward particular kinds of viewpoints in hiring and promotions. This peculiar form of Stockholm syndrome—they wither in the face of attacks from the environmental left—is strengthened by the internal bureaucratic interests of those very same PR and environmental departments. At the same time, self-interest matters, as the corporate decision makers have shareholders and a capital market to whom they must answer. And so where they stand—the specifics of their environmental posturings—depends on where they sit, a reality illustrated beautifully by BP, formerly British Petroleum Company, these days a decidedly uncool corporate name.

For several years BP promoted the slogan “Beyond Petroleum,” a rather curious stance for a petroleum company, and so both amusing and striking as a blatant form of cheap penance for an environmental and accident record that was not sterling. But that was then. In the here and now BP is very proud of its efforts at “Advancing the Energy Transition,” the title of a brand-new report from BP released just in time for, yes, Earth Day. It details BP’s determination to prove its bona fides in terms of political correctitude, in particular its central goal of aiding a global transition toward a “low carbon” future through the use of less coal, more natural gas, and more wind and solar power, for which natural gas will be a “valuable back-up” due to the inherent “intermittency” of the renewables.

So BP wants everyone to know that BP stands foursquare against “carbon,” a term appearing 149 times in 24 pages. It cannot be repeated enough: “Carbon” is bad. Coal is bad. Natural gas is good. Wind and solar power backed up with natural gas plants are good. It is essential that the Paris (COP-21) goal of limiting temperature increases to 2 degrees C be achieved, and so “carbon” must be priced, that is, a (presumably global) carbon tax must be imposed.

Because gas consumption produces a bit more than half of the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of coal (per btu of energy output), BP’s carbon tax would yield a competitive advantage for gas production. As Pravda in its glory days would have put it: Is it an accident that BP produces no coal, but does produce about 6.4 billion cubic feet of natural gas (and 1.4 million barrels of oil and natural gas liquids) per day? The massive subsidies for wind and solar power, both explicit and implicit, represent another subsidy for natural gas producers, as BP acknowledges implicitly, because the unreliability of renewable electricity means that the wind farms and solar facilities must be backed up with conventional plants so as to avoid blackouts, and it is gas plants that are the most suitable for that function.wayback

BP is proud to note that its renewables business in 2017 reduced GHG emissions by 2.9 million tons. Annual worldwide GHG emissions are about 49 billion metric tons; the temperature effect of that cut in GHG emissions yields a temperature reduction in 2100 very close to zero. Precisely whom does BP think it’s fooling?

And about that renewable energy that BP claims to be “clean”: There is nothing clean about it. There is the heavy-metal pollution created by the production process for wind turbines. There are the noise and flicker effects of wind turbines. There is the large problem of solar panel waste. There is the wildlife destruction caused by the production of renewable power. There is the land use both massive and unsightly, made necessary by the unconcentrated nature of renewable energy.

And above all, there is the increase—yes, increase—in the emissions of conventional effluents and GHG emissions caused by the up-and-down cycling of the natural gas backup generation units needed to avoid blackouts, a reality that BP fails to note.

BP fails to tell us how high the carbon tax ought to be, what environmental effects it would yield, or the massive policy failures and distortions it would engender. But BP is certain that, again, it is crucial that the COP-21 goal of limiting temperature increases to 2 degrees C be achieved. Actually, the Paris agreement is an absurdity, but it is interesting that it established a secondary goal of limiting warming by 2100 to 1.5 degrees C rather than the original 2 degrees C as advertised. Given that the evidence on climate phenomena is inconsistent with the “saving the planet” view and given that atmospheric temperatures have been rising at about 0.1 +/–0.03 degrees C per decade since 1979, the secondary goal is a tacit admission that limiting temperature increases to 2 degrees C already has been “achieved” without any GHG policies at all.

The term “carbon,” however solidly embedded in the public discourse, is a misnomer in that carbon dioxide is not “carbon” and it is not a pollutant. By far the most important GHG in terms of the radiative properties of the troposphere is water vapor; why does no one call it a “pollutant?” Obviously, it is because ocean evaporation is a natural process, but so are volcanic eruptions, the emissions from which of fluorine, sulfur, mercury, and ash are pollutants by any definition.

Earth Day is a classic religious holiday: The interpretation of destructive weather as the gods’ punishment of men for the sins of Man is ancient. And just as the pagans for millennia attempted to prevent destructive weather by worshipping golden idols, so do modern environmentalists now attempt to prevent destructive weather by bowing down before recycling bins. And thus do we find the recycling logo on innumerable corporate web pages and products. At a more general level, a simplistic but accurate summary of the underlying tenets of modern environmentalism can be stated as follows: Once upon a time, 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 economic suffering can we return to the loving embrace of Mother Gaia.

BP is hardly the only sinner in this congregation. But is a prominent one indeed, and it is distressing that so many corporate officials are willing, indeed anxious, to jump on the environmentalist bandwagon in the hope that the green alligator will eat them last. That such groveling before the environmental left—anti-human, anti-capitalism, anti-freedom, and in reality anti-environment—has been combined with rent-seeking for government favors is a measure of the social and economic destructiveness of the green-corporate alliance that is the core of Earth Day.