In honor of this 45th anniversary of the first Earth Day, let us recall the wisdom of Dogbert, that noted political philosopher and sage observer of the human condition: “You can’t save the earth unless you’re willing to make other people sacrifice.”

As the old saying goes, truer words were never spoken. Earth Day brings each year a worldwide religious celebration at which large masses of people both right-thinking and affluent proclaim their devotion to Gaia and their love of humanity, while displaying their contempt for the lives and wellbeing of actual people, the poorest among them in particular. Should you find that judgment overly harsh, merely consider two musings from prominent organizers of the original Earth Day. In 1990, the late Alexander King, cofounder of the Club of Rome in 1968, argued in the context of the use of DDT to control malaria:

My own doubts came when DDT was introduced for civilian use. In Guyana, within two years it had almost eliminated malaria, but at the same time, the birth rate had doubled. … My chief quarrel with DDT in hindsight is that it has greatly added to the population problem.

Another second example came in 1971 courtesy of Michael McClosky, the former executive director of the Sierra Club, during an Ethiopian famine:

The worst thing we could do is give aid…. the best thing would be to just let nature seek its own balance and to let the people there just starve.

Tens or hundreds of millions of the world’s poor have died from malaria as a direct result of the multination ban on the use of DDT, driven by vastly exaggerated fears of its harmful effects on various bird species. This indifference to the death toll among the least fortunate is strangely reminiscent of Joseph Stalin’s view of the difference between one death and millions; and it is no accident, as Pravda used to put it, that the modern Earth Day mindset reflects that of the original.

How so? Let us consider the herculean efforts by the environmental left to move both the industrialized and developing economies away from electric power generated with fossil fuels — coal- and gas-fired generation — and toward “renewable” power generated with sunlight and wind flows.

That renewable power is vastly more expensive than conventional generation is an eternal truth that no amount of political propaganda can refute, as the British, Germans, and others have discovered to their regret. (As an aside, the expansion of renewable power increases the emissions of conventional pollutants and greenhouse gases, a reality rather inconsistent with the proclaimed concern of the Earth Day celebrants with environmental quality, a dark irony to be explored another day.) Those high costs must have the effect of reducing the consumption of electricity, both currently and prospectively, the latter the case in particular for the world’s poor striving (desperately) to achieve improved standards of living. But the environmental left simply demands as a matter of principle that the expansion of power generation capacity in the underdeveloped world be provided predominantly or exclusively by renewables, regardless of the undeniably higher costs and ensuing effects on GDP and, indeed, life expectancies. With respect to GDP, consider the data published by the World Bank for about 150 nations during 2011-2013, on per capita electricity consumption and per capita GDP, as illustrated in the following chart.

Obviously, correlation is not causation, and the relationship between electricity consumption and GDP is one of mutual causation: A bigger economy uses more power, and greater power consumption (for example, for goods production) makes the economy bigger. But the simple correlation between the two series is 0.710: A 1 percent increase in one is associated with a 0.71 percent increase in the other. It simply is not plausible that an increase in electricity costs driven by a substitution of renewable in place of conventional generation would fail to yield adverse effects on GDP, with the varied and serious negative effects attendant upon that impact. Using the World Bank data on life expectancies, the simple correlation between per capita GDP and life expectancies is 0.613; again, correlation is not causation, but can anyone argue with a straight face that wealthier is not healthier?

And so let us examine the relationship between electricity consumption and life expectancies. The following chart illustrates it, again using the World Bank data noted above.

The simple correlation between the two series is 0.514. And that is the central reality of Earth Day 2015: Expensive power equals less life. The paeans to “renewable” electricity, the demands for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, the religious fervor in support of “sustainability” and other nebulous parameters: All of the sound and fury will obscure the underlying human suffering that is the tragic reality of Earth Day.

Benjamin Zycher is the John G. Searle scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.