The environmental movement has been doing its utmost to sabotage energy production since the 1960s, long before it was able to latch onto the prospect of global warming. Its opposition to atomic power has nothing to do with global warming, nor does its opposition to the construction of dams to provide hydro-electric power. Indeed, if global warming and the consumption of fossil fuels, which it alleges is the cause of global warming, were really its concern, it would be a leading advocate of atomic power and of the construction of new and additional dams to provide hydro-electric power. Instead, however, the environmental movement opposes atomic power even more adamantly than it opposes power derived from fossil fuels, and it also urges the actual tearing down of existing dams, even though they provide substantial electric power. (On this last, see, for example, the article in today’s New York Times “Climate Change Adds Twist to Debate Over Dams.â€)
The only sources of power that the environmental movement is willing to allow are wind and sunlight. The first is subject to the proviso that birds are not killed by flying into the propellers of the windmills. The second makes no allowance for all of the times when sunlight is blocked, i.e., in cloudy weather and at night, when the sun has gone down.
Environmentalists like to say that there is a third alternative source of energy: conservation.
“Conservation†as a source of energy is a contradiction in terms. It is not a source of energy. Its actual meaning is simply using less energy. It is a source of energy for one use only at the price of deprivation somewhere else. Moreover, the logic of conservationism is not consistent with using energy saved in one part of the economic system to expand energy use in other parts. Those other parts are also supposed to conserve, i.e., to use less energy rather than more.
The objective of the environmental movement is and always has been simply the destruction of energy production. Its further goal is the undoing of the Industrial Revolution and the return of the modern world to the poverty and misery of the pre-Industrial era.
This goal is not hidden. It is stated openly. In the words of Maurice Strong, Founder of the UN Eco-summits and Undersecretary General of the UN: “Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring [that] about?†—as quoted in The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism (Washington, D. C.: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2007), p. 6.
Destruction of industrial civilization, by means of destroying its foundation in man-made power. That, not the avoidance of global warming, is what environmentalism seeks.
The question is, are enough people stupid enough to let it succeed and allow themselves to be destroyed?
This article is copyright © 2007, by George Reisman. Permission is hereby granted to reproduce and distribute it electronically and in print, other than as part of a book and provided that mention of the author’s web site www.capitalism.net is included. (Email notification is requested.) All other rights reserved. George Reisman is the author of Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics (Ottawa, Illinois: Jameson Books, 1996) and is Pepperdine University Professor Emeritus of Economics.
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I always wondered why we don’t spend all of our excess power, at least 2% of the total generated, to simply pump water uphill. This is by far the most efficient way to store power.
Hopefully the rest of Wester Mankind will get it. I really think the USA has it. We shall see here soon as John, I tell you what to say and pay me money and continue fighting wars, McCain is running on the stop global warming platform. Maybe the Republican party will warm up to his crap. I doubt it.
George
What is even more astonishing is that if all coal-fired power plants in the US were repalced with nuclear powerplants, the US would meet the Kyoto Protocol emission requirements without doing anything else.
The late Petr Beckmann wrote a book entiltled “The Health Hazards of not going Nuclear”. The book was published in the late 70′s, and nothing that has happened in between, including Chernobyl, changes the validity of the conclusion he made at that time.
To reinforce Dr. Reisman’s point, the following is excerpted from a post by Joshua Frank at the left-wing BrickBurner.org blog:
(Emphasis mine.)
As to Dr. Reisman’s question, “Are enough people stupid enough?” — the mass-minded display of absolute conformity to the green party line by the media, schools, general public and even big business is a sign that yes, they are.
On a related note, where are all those “separation of church and state” harpies on Earth Day, when tax loot is spent on brainwashing kids to worship Gaia?
Dr. Reisman, did you research your conclusions here?
“The objective of the environmental movement is and always has been simply the destruction of energy production. Its further goal is the undoing of the Industrial Revolution and the return of the modern world to the poverty and misery of the pre-Industrial era.”
“Destruction of industrial civilization, by means of destroying its foundation in man-made power. That, not the avoidance of global warming, is what environmentalism seeks.”
If so, can you please explain away these well-known environmentalists, who have publicly and prominently advocated a greater use of nuclear power? Are they just not REAL “environmentalists”?
Stewart Brand, founder of the “Whole Earth Catalog”: http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=14406
Gaia theorist James Lovelock: http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,463367,00.html
http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/article61727.ece
Greenpeace cofounder Patrick Moore: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/14/AR2006041401209.html
Friends of the Earth Hugh Montefiore: http://www.thetablet.co.uk/articles/1963/;
http://www.loe.org/shows/shows.htm?programID=04-P13-00048#feature1
Environmentalists For Nuclear Energy: http://www.ecolo.org/
I know it may be emotionally satisfying to see environmentalists as misanthropic, but I’m afraid that your Manichaean perspective masks an awful lot, and is hardly true to an Austrian understanding of how people struggle over resources when there are no clear property rights to permit true market transactions.
Ironically, in many ways environmentalists resemble you – they paint as black and white and in moral terms what they fail to understand.
The difference, of course, is that as an economist you should know better.
Sincerely,
TokyoTom
PS: Martin Levy noted that one should always “pray that your opposition be wicked. In wickedness there is a strong strain toward rationality. Therefore there is always the possibility, in theory, of handling the wicked by outthinking them…. If good intentions are combined with stupidity, it is impossible to outthink them.â€
Levy’s Nine Laws of the Disillusionment of the True Liberal http://public.lanl.gov/cbarnes/LevyDisillusionment.html
Many environmentalists may be the combination that Levy refers to. The real problem with this is that it is easily manipulable by rent-seekers.
TT,
The above are exceptions to the rule, as the environmental movement as a whole is in virtual lockstep in its opposition to nuclear power.
And Patrick Moore, by the way, is an outspoken opponent of human-caused global warming, being prominently featured in compelling documentary “The Great Global Warming Swindle.”
For any true environmentalist — i.e., for anyone who truly wants to protect the Earth from human abuse and is not using environmentalism as cover for pro-state anti-industrialism — human-caused global warming is a disastrous waste of money that could be usefully spent on real problems like Peak Oil:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-596805984521272213
Tokyo Tom,
Of course, one can always find exceptions to a rule, however, do you really believe that support for nuclear energy is supported by environmentalists as a whole? My long experience with them tells me otherwise. Indeed, it is very rare to find a global-warming-alarmist that is willing to switch to nuclear, which is why I have always thought you a bit of an odd duck.
National Geographic has a great story on the melting of the polar ice caps on Mars at http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/02/070228-mars-warming.html.
I was watching PBS last night, and Nova did a program on solar power, and the set up to the piece included the claim that solar is the only source that can meet humanity’s future energy needs. Simply untrue, and it implicitly shows environmentalism’s antipathy for nuclear power.
Yancey,
Yes, nuclear and other sources can help, but I agree with Nova that solar’s the future:
“We are awash in energy (10,000 times more than required to meet all our needs falls on Earth), but we are not very good at capturing it. That will change with the full nanotechnology-based assembly of macro objects at the nano scale, controlled by massively parallel information processes, which will be feasible within twenty years. Even though our energy needs are projected to triple within that time, we’ll capture that .0003 of the sunlight needed to meet our energy needs with no use of fossil fuels, using extremely inexpensive, highly efficient, lightweight, nano-engineered solar panels, and we’ll store the energy in highly distributed (and therefore safe) nanotechnology-based fuel cells. Solar power is now providing 1 part in 1,000 of our needs, but that percentage is doubling every two years, which means multiplying by 1,000 in twenty years. Almost all the discussions I’ve seen about energy and its consequences, such as global warming, fail to consider the ability of future nanotechnology-based solutions to solve this problem.” — http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0692.html
I think the title is largely correct. There are two general arguments for “conserving energy”:
1. Fossil fuels, in particular, are finite, so the burn rate should lessened should “we” otherwise run out before any reasonable alternative is found.
2. Energy usage, since it is largely hydrocarbon based, will cause bad ecological effects like “global warming.” (I don’t normally bother investigating whether there is any truth to so-called global warming, since nearly all of those who preach “doing something” about it have no practical proposal of what is to be done.)
Also, it seems that those proposing “conserving energy” believe it can be accomplished via two methods:
1. Simply using less energy.
2. Use devices that are more energy efficient, thus created less demand for energy, and thus conserving energy indirectly.
All other things equal, there doesn’t seem to be any way of conserving energy in the global aggregate without simultaneously diminishing global aggregate wealth, or at least having a retarding effect on its growth. For example, one way to conserve some energy is to buy a more energy efficient automobile, take the dollar savings on fuel costs and then literally destroy those dollar savings along with the old vehicle. That way, the saved dollars will not end up buying energy in some other place in the economy, nor can the old vehicle burn up any more fuel. (Of course, this ignores the energy cost of creating the new vehicle, but let us assume that the total net does mean using less energy in meeting the driver’s transportation needs over some extended time period.) Destroying the old vehicle and the saved dollars is a net loss of wealth.
A rather fundamental problem in all of this is that all action is energy based. Mass is neither created nor destroyed. In the world aggregate, mass is only reformed and transported — that is, those actions are 100% energy based. So while an individual’s concern is about the title change of real or personal property (mass) in a given transaction, every payment can, for the purpose of energy conservation considerations, be considered an energy payment, even if the expended energy is small. Some have said that energy is like any other good. It is not.
If I save a dollar on gas, I don’t stuff the dollar in the mattress or burn it. I either buy something which took energy to make, go water skiing, or save/invest it. If I buy something, say a new coffee cup, it took nothing but energy to acquire the raw materials, process them, and then transport them to my house. If I go water skiing, then that is clearly nothing but an energy expenditure. If I invest it, then it is provided to “someone” to start some new activity/business. The activity is again nothing but an energy expenditure. No energy was conserved in the aggregate.
All other things equal, the idea that there can be “global aggregate energy conservation” is a fallacy of composition. Local conservation is not aggregate conservation. It is merely a redistribution of where energy is expended. In effect, and all other things equal, using less energy means being poorer than one could otherwise be. The best reason to locally conserve energy is to make oneself richer. I’m all for that.
Here is an old article I thought was interesting:
http://technology.open.ac.uk/eeru/staff/horace/kbpotl.htm
David:
any true environmentalist — i.e., for anyone who truly wants to protect the Earth from human abuse and is not using environmentalism as cover for pro-state anti-industrialism.
Can you explain what you mean by this very loaded phrasing?
- Is it that you consider mainstream environmentalists – or environmental leaders – to GENERALLY be “using environmentalism as cover for pro-state anti-industrialism”? Or only in the case of climate change?
- And are “true environmentalists” those “who truly want[] to protect the Earth from human abuse”?
- What do you call those ordinary people who are NIMBYs? West VA folks who are protesting mountaintop removal? Those on the East Coast who are trying to stop acid rain that starts from Midwestern utilities?
- Those ordinary people who see cases of what they call environmental abuse outside the US – that occur when resources are not clearly owned or property rights cannot be enforced (as Austrians Block, Cordato and Rothbard explain)?
- Is anybody who is concerned about climate change NOT an environmentalist in your book?
- Are you simply saying that thise who don’t share your agenda are not true environmentalists?
I’m just seeking clarification of your own understanding of the word environmentalist.
Yancey:
Of course it’s fair to say that most environmentalists oppose nuclear power, and my pointing to environmental leaders who are willing to take public stands in the other direction doesn’t change that.
But it certainly does cut against Dr. Reisman’s monotonous and uninsightful screed, carried on over the last year or more, that environmentalists generally are misanthropic – caring more about “nature” than their fellow man – and just want to destroy industrial civilization.
Instead, these exceptions show that, while environmentalists generally care about nature, they are not trying to put an end to industrial civilization altogether but simply to figure out how to lessen the environmental damage that industrial civilization does produce – when modern market economies meet either unowned, unprotected or “public” assets or kleptocracies. The exceptions show that the run of the mill environmentalist may not be sufficiently informed to understand either the institutional underpinnings of environmental problems (such as too much government and too much rent-seeking), or to understand that trade-offs have to be made. Rather, the average environmentalists sees problems that he doesn’t really understand, except to distrust big corporations (which do manaipulation government) and to sense that outside the West that a big problem is not enought government/law and order.
Is the best answer to this lack of understanding to turn our backs on what Austrianism tells us about property rights, failures of catallaxy and rent-seeking, to deny that problems exist and to simply label as evil those who misunderstand the problems that concern them?
Dr. Reisman should be ashamed of his own unperceptive and ungentlemanly rants. But it precisely mirrors the ignorant mysticism that many environmentalists manifest, and sadly reflects the big rent-seeking game that is at play when resources are ineffectually owned.
As to nuclear power, I have long seen dirty coal as presenting the bigger problem, even as it is difficult to approve the various government subsidies to nuclear power.
Tokyo Tom,
I think Reisman is probably a little too indiscriminate in his writings on this subject, but I think he is largely seeing things for what they are. Far too many leaders of the environmental movement are clearly anti-capitalist, anti-free-market, and most definitely pro-state, and they do advocate a reversal in economic development- longing to force a return to a less materialistic way of life. As for the public at-large, I think most of them are woefully ill-informed and are unable to distinguish good science from bad and good policy from bad.
The turning point in the global warming debate will come in about 10-20 years when the weather is observed to be the same as it is today for all practical purposes. Then we will stop worrying about actively doing anything to stop CO2 increase. In the interim, we will actually do nothing about it. How do I know we will do nothing? I only have to observe how angry people get about high gasoline prices.
greg,
You are, of course, correct, but I have made the same point many, many times to people other than those on this site, and it is like pounding one’s head against a brick wall.
Yancey,
“In the interim, we will actually do nothing about it.”
Except pour money down a rat hole, as Big Business sees the green in green:
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/04/26/776/
TT,
With the collapse of the world socialist movement in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s demise and China’s embrace of capitalism, tens of millions of disgruntled socialists found a home in the environmental movement, seeing that it had the potential to punish industrial capitalism by other means.
Thus is free-market environmentalism an oxymoron to most environmentalists, and thus have I come to refer to myself as a conservationist instead.
In your particular case, I don’t doubt your sincerity about global warming. I just think that you’ve gotten caught up in something that will prove to have been folly years hence, as Peak Oil — http://depletion.blogspot.com/2007/03/world-according-to-bakhtiari.html — and Peak Dollar — http://www.prudentbear.com/articles/show/2001 — take center stage.
Greg,
I think you made the point in a very articulate way.
Moreover, government officials usually couple “the energy saving craze” with a “credit boom craze” to boost consumption (I’m thinking in particular about French soon to be president Sarkozy)!
There must be some deeper reason why folks just buy all these monstrous contradictions…
Yancey, I agree with you that “too many leaders of the environmental movement are clearly anti-capitalist, anti-free-market, and most definitely pro-state, and they do advocate a reversal in economic development- longing to force a return to a less materialistic way of life.” But that is just one slice of environmental leaders, who are unlikely to find traction in leading Americans to lower levels of well-being. There are plenty of environmentalists who understand that the problems that concern them stem from deficiencies in the market system, which leads them wrongly to statism. Finally, there are very definitely environmental leaders who clearly understand that environmental problems stem from failures in catallaxy resulting either from unclear or unenforceable property rights or from rent-seeking when the state gets involved.
And as to those who are “anti-capitalist, anti-free-market, and most definitely pro-state,” why is it that Miseseans have such a difficult time understanding that many voters/citizens who see the government being misused by corporate interests feel that the natural solution lies in wresting control of government, rather than in hacking back government? And why does Misesans devote so much time to ad hominem attacks on the motives of environmentalists, while ignoring the fact that industrial civilization DOES produce environmental damage – when modern market economies meet either unowned, unprotected or “public” assets or kleptocracies – and that environmentalism itself is essentially a product of increasing wealth?
My own view is that the turning point has already been reached, that we are already doing alot privately about climate change and alternative energies, but there will be continued pork barrel and – of course – continued climate change, given the desires for growth, long lead times in shifting energy supply and demand, and the inertia built into the climate system.
Tom.
I am pleased an suprised by your new more balanced comments.
Makes all that time spent abusing you seem far more worthwhile.
But I tell you the truth. It will be COOLER for sure in 20 years time. And it will be cooler in 30 years time also.
Beyond that I’m not prepared to hazzard-a-guess.
No wait a minute.
I got it wrong and you’re just as crazy as ever.
Graeme, why are you missing the fun on the other threads?
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