It is Earth Day, when pieties flow like wine, when the self-applause of the right-thinking is deafening, when the antihuman core of modern environmentalism shines bright, and when the destructiveness of groupthink becomes ever more pronounced. And when an understanding of its true meaning is served by the profound wisdom of that noted political philosopher and sage observer of the human condition, Dogbert: “You can’t save the earth unless you’re willing to make other people sacrifice.”
Thus is revealed the dark entertainment value of Earth Day and all that it represents. Consider the round-the-world travels by elites to conferences held at famous resorts, the attendant lavish partying, and the resulting massive amounts of greenhouse gases emitted by the participants. Avert not your eyes from the utter meaninglessness of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change generally and the recent COP-21 — the “breakthrough” agreement — in particular. Behold the Europeans’ massive retreat from “green” electricity, as its costs and destructiveness have become as obvious as the sunrise. Consider the revealing saga of solar and wind power in the US, the proponents of which argue — simultaneously! — that they now are cost-competitive but that there can be no end to the large subsidies both explicit and implicit on which the technologies are utterly dependent.
Learn more: Earth Day and the Celebration of Suffering
“Green” energy — more below about how very ungreen it is in reality — is the central component of an international climate policy ostensibly intended to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. It is, unsurprisingly, a fundamental conceit of the global affluent: It is the members of that group, after all, that can afford higher energy bills, as a minor price to pay to indulge their fantasies about “saving the planet,” while the world’s poor suffer the adverse consequences of such utopianism. And for all of its manifest problems, America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, also is the land of the affluent, as any international comparison of per capita GDP illustrates.
Accordingly, the recent history of the American green-energy sector is revealing. That history features repeated extensions of the production tax subsidies advertised each time as only temporary, ostensibly until scale and learning efficiencies are achieved. After almost 25 years and 8 extensions, one might conclude that the industry’s inability to compete without such subventions are fundamental rather than the mere product of growing pains. And the reward that the taxpayers have received for this largesse is a cornucopia of bankruptcies, power unreliability, increased pollution, the destruction of land and wildlife, and the creation of a permanent class of corporate welfare recipients.
Learn more: Earth Day Message: Go Ahead and Print Your Emails, Free of Any ‘eco-guilt’
The bankruptcies — despite the subsidies — include such prominent names as Abound ($400 million federal loan guarantee) and Solyndra ($535 million federal loan guarantee); and SunEdison ($650 million in federal grants and tax credits) appears likely soon to join the funeral procession. The unreliability — low “capacity factors” — of wind and solar power is fundamental because of the inescapable reality that air flows and sunlight are intermittent, so that backup power generated with fossil fuels is necessary to avoid blackouts. Because those backup plants must be ramped up and down depending on whether the wind or sun are blowing or shining, they cannot be operated efficiently. The result? More pollution rather than less, a dark reality of “clean and renewable” power, about which the proponents have and will preserve a deafening silence during Earth Days past, present, and future.
With respect to the destruction of land, let us agree that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but — seriously now — can anyone not tied financially to such projects find this or this to be appealing visually? And then there are the adverse effects of such projects on birds and other wildlife; somehow the standards applied to the birds and fish killed or injured by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill are absent for politically correct energy.
Learn more: Earth Day Review: Polls on Environmental Issues and the Flint Water Crisis
About that permanent corporate welfare: Is it not ironic that the ubiquitous environmentalist denunciations of evil corporations, a central part of the political drive for green power, have yielded a world in which those very same corporations have inserted their snouts ever more deeply into the public trough? Merely consider the 20 recipients of the largest federal grants and tax credits since 2000, in descending order of taxpayer largesse, from $2.2 billion down to a mere $532 million: Iberdrola, NextEra Energy, NRG Energy, Southern Company, Summit Power, SCS Energy, Tenaska, Duke Energy, General Electric, Exelon, Energias de Portugal, Leucadia National, SunEdison, General Atomics, Abengoa, Air Products and Chemicals, Ameren, E.ON, AES, and Invenergy.
Do you notice a pattern? Do not be surprised, dear reader, that such cronyism flourishes while the larger “climate” campaign to reduce greenhouse gas emissions would impose costs approximating 1 percent of global GDP, or roughly $600 billion to $750 billion per year, inflicted disproportionately upon the world’s poor. This problem is to be solved with a “Green Climate Fund,” beginning at $100 billion and growing annually. Will a welfare program for the world’s impoverished prove consistent with the economic growth absolutely necessary for a long-term reduction in grinding poverty? Don’t bet on it.
That redistribution dynamic — expensive energy and grinding poverty for the world’s downtrodden, and wealth transfers to the well-connected and the right-thinking — is the tragic reality of Earth Day and all it represents. 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, who cofounded the Club of Rome in 1968, argued in the context of using 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.
And in 1971, Michael McClosky, the former executive director of the Sierra Club, said 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 DDT use, driven by deeply disingenuous propaganda on its harmful effects on various bird species, vastly exaggerated on Earth Days past. 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.
Learn more: Earth Day Review: Polls on Environmental Issues and the Flint Water Crisis
And thus have we arrived at the underlying truth of Earth Day: The “dark entertainment value” noted above is heavy on the dark and a good deal lighter on the entertainment. Let the partying begin.
Benjamin Zycher is the John G. Searle scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.