What happened to Greenpeace, and the environmental movement along with it

Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore has written a book, Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist. (No reviews at Amazon yet; I anticipate a lot of 5's and 1's from those on opposite sides.) In a similarly titled article at the Vancouver Sun, he describes some of the history of the organization and the evolution of his beliefs and program. An excerpt:

Some activists simply couldn't make the transition from confrontation to consensus; it was as if they needed a common enemy. When a majority of people decide they agree with all your reasonable ideas the only way you can remain confrontational and antiestablishment is to adopt ever more extreme positions, eventually abandoning science and logic altogether in favour of zero-tolerance policies.

The collapse of world communism and the fall of the Berlin Wall during the 1980s added to the trend toward extremism. The Cold War was over and the peace movement was largely disbanded. The peace movement had been mainly Western-based and anti-American in its leanings. Many of its members moved into the environmental movement, bringing with them their neo-Marxist, far-left agendas. To a considerable extent the environmental movement was hijacked by political and social activists who learned to use green language to cloak agendas that had more to do with anti-capitalism and anti-globalization than with science or ecology. I remember visiting our Toronto office in 1985 and being surprised at how many of the new recruits were sporting army fatigues and red berets in support of the Sandinistas.

I don't blame them for seizing the opportunity. There was a lot of power in our movement and they saw how it could be turned to serve their agendas of revolutionary change and class struggle. But I differed with them because they were extremists who confused the issues and the public about the nature of our environment and our place in it. To this day they use the word industry as if it were a swear word. The same goes for multinational, chemical, genetic, corporate, globalization, and a host of other perfectly useful terms. Their propaganda campaign is aimed at promoting an ideology that I believe would be extremely damaging to both civilization and the environment.

The group was infiltrated and taken over by enemies of Western civilization, following the Gramscian paradigm. I would call myself a conservationist, and many others, I'm sure, who are in favor of the continuation and advancement of industrialized civilization would as well. We are not in favor of pollution or environmental destruction, but we do not want to go back to living in huts and reading manuscripts written by hand on parchment.

One way to tell genuine environmentalists, or conservationists, from the enemies of civilization is by their attitude on nuclear power. Energy is the sine qua non of civilization. An abundance of cheap energy is what provides the leisure for all the pursuits of civilization, such as art, science, debate about law and government, and everything else beyond wresting a bare living from the land. Patrick Moore is in favor of nuclear power. How many current Greenpeacers are in favor of it? I'd venture to say very few.

Most of the movement followers are dupes, of course, not consciously enemies of Western civilization. People don't follow through their thinking. If we put the coal companies out of business, if we don't allow new nuclear plants, if we don't allow drilling for oil, all to follow the green mirage, then our energy supplies will dwindle, and we will be on the verge of a new Dark Age, certainly an end to prosperity. But the useful idiots of environmentalism don't think far enough ahead to see their own doom in the policies they espouse.

A contributor at AoSHQ has linked the article in the post State of Fear, 2011. Contributor Andy has worthwhile observations of his own to add, and some videos of Michael Crichton. The whole thing is worth the click.

10:10 — Deep Greens fantasizing in public

Everybody's seen this by now, right? The video produced by the environmental group 10:10.org with the red button and the people getting blown to bloody bits for being indifferent about this environmental action. Richard Curtis, Gillian Anderson, Radiohead, so on and so forth.

Treacher has found a video response. Taranto and commenters at the WSJ have commentary. James Delingpole has a couple more examples of the enviro-terror genre.

Nothing new about this. Paul (Sea Shepherd) Watson's call for ~6,000,000,000 deaths, as soon as possible please, is still on the Sea Shepherd website. James Hanson was calling for trials for AGW deniers, not so long ago. Paul Krugman used the expression, "traitors to the planet." The penalty for treason is death.

Lefties, "progressives," enviros, what have you, they don't see human beings. They see economic units, or classes, or elements of the dialectic. In connection with which, Andrea Harris wrote about "The people Obama doesn't see." She also has a piece about the 10:10 video.

In the fantasies of "environmentalists," somehow all those awful people just disappear, but the dreamers are spared to view the resulting Paradise. That will only work if the environmentalists supervise the slaughter themselves. In the 10:10 video, the fuzzy teddy bear mask slipped.

Added: Andrew Bolt has a couple more of these toxic ads. Via Hot Air. S. Weasel has a recycling ad. Ed Driscoll has a post with many links, and a follow-up. Eric S. Raymond writes, "From now on, this video should be Exhibit A whenever the global-warming alarmists pretend to moral or intellectual superiority over the rest of us."

Eyjafjallajökull

That's the volcano in Iceland that's causing so much havoc. Looks like this:



They are saying it may erupt again. This, you see, is geoengineering, as done on the large scale, by Gaia herself. Piddling plans of self-styled climatologists to launch particles into the atmosphere to raise the Earth's albedo, to block those deadly warming rays from the Sun, are shown up as the silliness they always were. If we get another Tambora event ("eighteen hundred and froze to death") out of this volcano, will the cap 'n' traders and greenies finally realize that warmer is better? I expect not. There's too much money already invested in the contrary view.

Paul Watson picks a fight, gets his name in the paper

Andrew Revkin put up a short post at Dot Earth on the collision between a Japanese whaler and a Sea Shepherd speedboat. It has garnered over 200 comments at this posting, many of them illuminating. Speaking of illumination, what are the Sea Shepherds doing with these green lasers?

Revkin seems to think that the Japanese ship was responsible for the collision. Some commenters wiser in the ways of the sea have endeavored to, ah, illuminate his thinking, but the main post still says "Sea Shepherd has released video from a distant vantage point that clearly shows the Japanese ship veering to starboard to close with the smaller protest craft."

Here's a video of a Sea Shepherd ship veering to starboard to close with another craft. What are they doing? Trying to capsize it?



That video comes from Sea Shepherd. They are proud of that. Sea Shepherd's tactics are reprehensible and criminal. But what could one expect from a group that uses this as an emblem?


I don't like whaling, but I like Paul Watson (and by extension his group, Sea Shepherd) even less. "We need to radically and intelligently reduce human populations to fewer than one billion." That's going to leave a lot of corpses.

A newish site on the subject: Lies of the Sea Shepherd.

At The New Yorker: Street Fight on the High Seas. The comments are better than the article, which is mostly an interview with Watson.

Can we save ourselves?

Pull back from the brink? Not jump off the bridge?

Joel Kotkin discusses Copenhagen, what's happening, who benefits. Capping Emissions, Trading On The Future: The West's goals in Copenhagen are tantamount to suicide. Thanks to Glenn Reynolds.

Enviros vs nukes

Ron Bailey takes a quick look back at an early round in the war of environmentalism against energy production: the breeder reactor.

I was recently at a conference on global warming where I had to read James Gustave Speth's environmentalist manifesto Red Sky at Morning: America and the Global Environmental Crisis. It's an amazingly reactionary and incoherent book. One passage that particularly irritated me dealt with fast breeder reactors. These are nuclear power plants that can produce more fuel (about 30 percent more) than they use. We would never have to mine a single pound more of uranium to produce electricity.…

in an alternative universe in which 200 reactors come online, U.S. greenhouse gas emissions would be about 35 percent lower than they currently are. In other words, the reactors that Speth opposed could have been a huge part of the solution to what Speth claims is humanity's "biggest threat." Like I said, really annoying.

Read the whole thing, it's short. Comments are worthwhile also. I like what Oldcrow has to say about the true foundation of environmentalism.

More on Joe Romm: Climate McCarthyism

I have mentioned Joseph Romm here before, not favorably. Now at Breakthrough Blog, a series about this blowhard. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. Possibly more to come?

Via Jonathan H. Adler at The Volokh Conspiracy, who also links to Ron Bailey at Reason, who also links to … and the Web goes on.

I did not actually plan to call Joe Romm a moron in the headline. That was sheer serendipitous felicity.

Useful idiots of AGW to demonstrate on Saturday

Full details at 350 dot org.

In 1971, Holdren was looking for an ice age

It would have been a short one, something of a hiatus in the ineluctable course of anthropogenic global warming.

Zombie has found another Holdren-Ehrlich collaboration, Global Ecology: Readings Toward a Rational Strategy for Man. The post at Zomblog includes scans and quotes. Zombie says:

My personal opinion is that Holdren is a “doom peddler” who latches onto the nightmare-scenario-du-jour — overpopulation, nuclear holocaust, global cooling, global warming (all of which he’s trumpeted at various points in his career) — and then wildly exaggerates it in order to scare the public into adopting his politicized “solutions.”

That seems accurate.

The "science" in the chapter in question, titled "Overpopulation and the Potential for Ecocide," reminds me of the bafflegab used in space opera. Got to repolarize the dilithium crystals, or all heck's going to bust loose.

Here earlier: Let's take a closer look at that book …, referring to Zombie's take on a different Holdren-Ehrlich collaboration, Ecoscience. Thanks, Zombie, for doing the heavy lifting on this stuff. Also, more on fear of ice in the '70's: Newsweek: The Cooling World. How times change, yet remain the same: always something to fear, something that's such a screaming emergency that only much more government can deal with it. <sarcasm>Better put the scientists in charge, and give them lots of money</sarcasm>.

Click the  "Deep Greens" label for far too much more of this claptrap, including the pulsating maggots.

Update: John Tierney links to Zombie: Holdren's Ice Age Tidal Wave.

Humanity resembles a pulsating mass of maggots

Oh yeah? I think we're a lot more like a writhing mass of maggots. If we're going to be maggots at all, we should writhe.

Michelle Malkin has been keeping up with looking into John Holdren. Read them all. The "maggots" business comes from this article, "The Challenge of Man's Future," by Harrison Brown (PDF).

[A] substantial fraction of humanity today is behaving as if it would like to create such a world. It is behaving as if it were engaged in a contest to test nature's willingness to support humanity and, if it had its way, it would not rest content until the earth were covered completely and to a considerable depth with a writhing mass of human beings, much as a dead cow is covered with a pulsating mass of maggots.

Writhing mass, dammit. Or perhaps we could pullulate.

What our masters think of us. In their rare candid moments.

Human beings are a resource, not a liability. Affluence is a goal, not a problem. People who tell you that affluence is a problem — those people are a problem.

Added, after commenting here: Holdren's plenary address to the AAAS in 2007 can be heard here, or downloaded as PowerPoint. It is dedicated to Brown: "My pre-occupation with the great problems at the intersection of science and technology with the human condition – and with the interconnectedness of these problems with each other – began when I read The Challenge of Man’s Future in high school. I later worked with Harrison Brown at Caltech."

Update: On rereading, I see that I was so irked by the pulsating that I missed the writhing, which was indeed mentioned. So that's better? Anti-humanists ought not to be in government. It's like hiring a vegetarian chef at a steakhouse.

Here earlier: Let's take a closer look at that book.

Let's take a closer look at that book …

… that Obama's science advisor John Holdren wrote with Paul Ehrlich. Zombie has the story: John Holdren, Obama's Science Czar, says: Forced abortions and mass sterilization needed to save the planet. Good grief.

This stuff about the Planetary Regime fits nicely with Al Gore's recent call for "global governance," and what that regime would do sounds a lot like the prescriptions of Herman Daly in Steady-State Economics, cited here earlier in Obama's chief energy regulator tells us to prepare to freeze in the dark.

Anyone for a New World Order?

Thanks to Blake for the Zombietime link.

Update: David Harsanyi should have linked to Zombie.

Another update: Follow-up post at Zomblog, as Holdren and and the White House attempt to deny that what was written was what was meant, or something like that.

Deep Greens in high places

In the London Times:

UK population must fall to 30m, says Porritt

JONATHON PORRITT, one of Gordon Brown’s leading green advisers, is to warn that Britain must drastically reduce its population if it is to build a sustainable society.

Porritt’s call will come at this week’s annual conference of the Optimum Population Trust (OPT), of which he is patron.

The trust will release research suggesting UK population must be cut to 30m if the country wants to feed itself sustainably.

Porritt said: “Population growth, plus economic growth, is putting the world under terrible pressure.

“Each person in Britain has far more impact on the environment than those in developing countries so cutting our population is one way to reduce that impact.”

… However, Porritt is winning scientific backing. Professor Chris Rapley, director of the Science Museum, will use the OPT conference, to be held at the Royal Statistical Society, to warn that population growth could help derail attempts to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Rapley, who formerly ran the British Antarctic Survey, said humanity was emitting the equivalent of 50 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year.

“We have to cut this by 80%, and population growth is going to make that much harder,” he said.

These recommendations are a lot more radical than what we have heard publicly from, say, John Holdren, Obama's science advisor, but stem from the same kind of Deep Green, Ehrlichite doom-saying mindset.

Porritt has a blog, which reveals that he is strongly opposed to nuclear power. Expanded use of nuclear power is the most readily available way to produce energy without emitting carbon. So cutting carbon emissions without using non-carbon-emitting power sources, yes, that does seem to require population cuts. To cut population by only 50%, but cut carbon emissions by 80%, would also require severe poverty for most of the remainder. Burying all the (30,000,000!) corpses would provide "shovel-ready" work for those remaining, and sequester the carbon in the bodies. Incineration would be counter-productive.

I feel like I need a shower, from thinking about this stuff. This is supposed to be responsible policy debate? Why isn't this kind of thing consigned immediately to the lunatic-rants bin?

There's more on this at Belmont Club, with a goodly number of comments.

This story is a few months old; I missed the Belmont Club post, and just came across it at Dr. Weevil.

Lomborg on Climate-Industrial Complex

Bjørn Lomborg had a piece in the WSJ last week that made some important points.

Some business leaders are cozying up with politicians and scientists to demand swift, drastic action on global warming. This is a new twist on a very old practice: companies using public policy to line their own pockets.

The tight relationship between the groups echoes the relationship among weapons makers, researchers and the U.S. military during the Cold War. President Dwight Eisenhower famously warned about the might of the "military-industrial complex," cautioning that "the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." He worried that "there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties."

This is certainly true of climate change. We are told that very expensive carbon regulations are the only way to respond to global warming, despite ample evidence that this approach does not pass a basic cost-benefit test. We must ask whether a "climate-industrial complex" is emerging, pressing taxpayers to fork over money to please those who stand to gain.

This phenomenon will be on display at the World Business Summit on Climate Change in Copenhagen this weekend. The organizers -- the Copenhagen Climate Council -- hope to push political leaders into more drastic promises when they negotiate the Kyoto Protocol's replacement in December.

The opening keynote address is to be delivered by Al Gore, who actually represents all three groups: He is a politician, a campaigner and the chair of a green private-equity firm invested in products that a climate-scared world would buy.

Naturally, many CEOs are genuinely concerned about global warming. But many of the most vocal stand to profit from carbon regulations. The term used by economists for their behavior is "rent-seeking." …

The partnership among self-interested businesses, grandstanding politicians and alarmist campaigners truly is an unholy alliance. The climate-industrial complex does not promote discussion on how to overcome this challenge in a way that will be best for everybody. We should not be surprised or impressed that those who stand to make a profit are among the loudest calling for politicians to act. Spending a fortune on global carbon regulations will benefit a few, but dearly cost everybody else.

Several pages of comments at Opinion Journal Forum.

This by way of Jerry Pournelle, who says:

The Climate Industrial Complex is the most dangerous organization in the world, and in my judgment is up there with Fascism and Marxism as dangers to Western Civilization. Those latter two are still around and still a danger -- indeed, some Greens use tactics they could well have learned from the Brown, Black, and Red terrors; and note that most of the Climate Industrial Complex program (which will transfer a trillion dollars and more to the Greens without any noticeable benefit to the civilization) is also the agenda of powerful factions of the US Congress and the Administration. It is hard to discern what Obama really believes, but he appears to be a convert to the "consensus".

Nature isn't cooperating and it's getting harder and harder to support parts of the "Climate Change" belief system, but the movement is so far advanced that it may not matter. When Roosevelt tried to end The Great Depression, one of his tools was TVA and the generation of energy. Without lower energy costs we will not climb out of our depression. It is important to make it clear that the debate is not over, there is no real scientific consensus on man-caused global warming, and destroying the economy in order to reduce CO2 output in the United States is all cost with almost no benefit. That debate must continue; and you may be certain, absolutely certain, that those who try to keep this a debate will be labeled "deniers" and denigrated as fools.

Typical of the effluent from Copenhagen is this from China:

China tells rich nations to cut emissions by 40 percent

BEIJING (Reuters) - Rich nations should cut their greenhouse gas emissions by at least 40 percent by 2020 from 1990 levels as part of a new global climate change pact, China said on Thursday, spelling out its stance ahead of negotiations.

The pact must ensure wealthy nations "take on quantified targets to drastically reduce emissions," said the statement, issued by the National Development and Reform Commission (www.ndrc.gov.cn), which steers Chinese climate change policy.

Developed countries should also give 0.5 to 1.0 percent of their annual economic worth to help other nations cope with global warming and curtail greenhouse gas emissions, China said in the document, laying down demands for a conference in Copenhagen in December meant to seal a new climate change pact.

Might as well ask for the moon even if all they want is a little piece of the green cheese. But with the watermelons currently in the government, they are likely to get all that and more. Somebody said, "The Constitution is not a suicide pact." But a treaty demanding a 40% reduction in carbon output, that is a suicide pact.

Al Gore is there, of course, sounding a Billy Mays-like note of urgency. "Buy now! Supplies are limited!" Actual quote:

“We have to do it this year. Not next year. This year,” Mr. Gore said. “The clock is ticking, because Mother Nature does not do bailouts.”

See what I mean? They want to ram this through before cooler heads (Hah! Cooler!) have a chance to get into the discussion.

Kids looking a little green when they come home from school?

Maybe their teacher showed them "The Story of Stuff." Annie Leonard going on for twenty minutes about the awfulness of prosperity. She sounds ever so knowledgeable while getting everything wrong. The NY Times says

More than 7,000 schools, churches and others have ordered a DVD version, and hundreds of teachers have written Ms. Leonard to say they have assigned students to view it on the Web.

It has also won support from independent groups that advise teachers on curriculum choices. Facing the Future, a curriculum developer for schools in all 50 states, is drafting lesson plans based on the video. And Ms. Leonard has a contract with Simon & Schuster to write a book based on the video.

If you can teach the children that industrial civilization is eeevil, and that the poor, weak government is the servant of the corporations (personification of government is shown shining the shoes of personification of corporations), that will make it much easier down the road to regulate, regulate, regulate. Freedom, it's a bad thing. People are so wasteful, so careless, they are trashing the planet.

I heard all this stuff in the sixties. It's just more Ehrlichite alarmist nonsense. Delivering it to children with the endorsement of the school system is officially sanctioned child abuse.

The script, in PDF form, with extensive footnotes, is here. Does it mean anything that this production was financed in part by the far-left Tides Foundation? Can Heritage or C.E.I. get something like this into the schools? Would they even try to do that?

Spotted at Half Sigma, where the commenters do a good job of demolishing this piece of watermelon propaganda.

Shannon Love on pr0n for environmentalists

At Chicago Boyz, reflections on the History Channel show "Life After People." Read the comments, too.

Obama's chief energy regulator tells us to prepare to freeze in the dark

In the NY Times:

Energy Regulatory Chief Says New Coal, Nuclear Plants May Be Unnecessary

No new nuclear or coal plants may ever be needed in the United States, the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission said today.

"We may not need any, ever," Jon Wellinghoff told reporters at a U.S. Energy Association forum.

He's very blithe.

Wellinghoff said renewables like wind, solar and biomass will provide enough energy to meet baseload capacity and future energy demands. Nuclear and coal plants are too expensive, he added.

"I think baseload capacity is going to become an anachronism," he said. "Baseload capacity really used to only mean in an economic dispatch, which you dispatch first, what would be the cheapest thing to do. Well, ultimately wind's going to be the cheapest thing to do, so you'll dispatch that first."

He added, "People talk about, 'Oh, we need baseload.' It's like people saying we need more computing power, we need mainframes. We don't need mainframes, we have distributed computing."

The technology for renewable energies has come far enough to allow his vision to move forward, he said. For instance, there are systems now available for concentrated solar plants that can provide 15 hours of storage.

"What you have to do, is you have to be able to shape it," he added. "And if you can shape wind and you can effectively get capacity available for you for all your loads.

"So if you can shape your renewables, you don't need fossil fuel or nuclear plants to run all the time. And, in fact, most plants running all the time in your system are an impediment because they're very inflexible. You can't ramp up and ramp down a nuclear plant. And if you have instead the ability to ramp up and ramp down loads in ways that can shape the entire system, then the old concept of baseload becomes an anachronism."

How modern the thinking! How very cutting-edge. How very senseless.

Wellinghoff has never worked for an energy company. He is a lawyer who has spent most of his life as a regulator and/or "consumer advocate," i.e., one who afflicts energy companies.

In the sidebar of this 2001 interview, he lists two favorite books. The first: Ecological Democracy by Roy Morrison. This one has no Amazon reviews, but here's an approving review. An excerpt:

As industrial civilization spins into crisis, neo-fascist demagogues (Buchanan, Zhirinovsky, for example) offer a return to hierarchical order as the way out. Such alternatives must, of course, be resisted. The third path is ecological democracy, arising "from popular ferment, aspiration for a better life, intolerance of the abuse of power, and collective and personal determination to build a just and enduring community." Only community-based, democratically managed associations have the potential to reconcile human needs for both community and freedom, and to erode the power of industrialism.

That part about the "popular ferment" sounds a lot like the French Revolution, and we all know how well that went.

The second book is Steady-State Economics by Herman Daly. This has one Amazon review, a 5-star that's pure gush, but contains the line, "We live in a finite world with few renewable resouces." You can read what appears to be Chapter 5 at a website with the charming URL of dieoff dot org. Here's something that's more of a précis than a review, at the Negative Population Growth site. Excerpt:

Our first task, Daly persuasively argues, is to stop growth. Only after we have stabilized the economy at or near its present size should we determine, and move to, an optimum scale. For one thing, since our survival depends on stopping growth, it is imperative that we do so as soon as possible. Besides, settling such issues as the optimal levels of population and per capita resource use will be difficult, as it will entail searching public debate over such fundamental questions as the present generation's obligations to posterity and reproductive freedom. Achieving consensus on them will be time-consuming. Meanwhile the economy would still be growing and further damaging the ecosystem. Also, making the economy smaller can't be done without halting growth first.

In order to accomplish the goal of negative population growth and a smaller economy, three "institutional arrangements" will be needed:

(1) Maximum and minimum limits on personal income, and a ceiling on personal wealth. If growing inequality in income and wealth is not reversed, Daly argues, private property and markets will become morally dubious. This will make extending the market to include birth licenses and depletion quotas politically difficult. Moreover, curbing these inequalities would make for more modest, and environmentally supportable, consumption. Daly is committed to social justice as well as sustainability, and income and wealth limits obviously serve that goal.²⁴

Since Daly made this proposal, income and wealth inequalities have exploded. Many large incomes were acquired by gaming the system, e.g., corporation executives paying themselves opulently. This threatens to delegitimize our economic system. What's more, such rapacity sets the wrong kind of example in a limited world.

(2) Transferable birth licenses. Obviously, population growth is a major force driving resource depletion and waste generation. Stabilizing population is therefore crucial. Daly's suggestion, first propounded by economist Kenneth Boulding in 1964, is to issue each person, or perhaps each woman, a quantity of reproduction licenses equal to the replacement fertility rate of 2.1 births per woman. Each woman would get 2.1 licenses, which she could buy or sell depending on how many children she wants to have.²⁵

Daly acknowledged that the directness of the birth license plan might put people off. "It frankly recognizes that reproduction must henceforth be considered a scarce right and logically faces the issue of how best to distribute that right and whether and how to permit voluntary reallocation." Because limiting reproduction is a forbidden subject for many people, they prefer indirect discouragement of reproduction through expanding women's social roles, encouraging consumption of commodities over having more children, and so on. Birth licenses, however, are more efficient. What's more, in his view, "the direct approach requires clarity of purpose and frank objectives, which are politically inconvenient when commitment to the objective is halfhearted to begin with."²⁶

(3) Depletion quotas for resources. The best way to control throughput, Daly argues, is to control the rate at which resources, especially nonrenewables such as fossil fuels, are depleted. Limiting the quantity of resources that enters the economy necessarily also limits how much waste and pollution leaves it. Moreover, since the stock of manmade capital is made from resources, and since the human population depends on resources, controlling the rate of depletion necessarily controls how big the population and capital stock can get.

If these are his favorite books, that says a lot. The man is an Ehrlichite, like Holdren. He wants negative population growth for the US and a smaller economy. When the economy gets smaller, we call that a recession. When it doesn't start growing again, it's a Depression. Jerry Pournelle says,

Low cost energy is the key to economic growth, and nothing the government is doing would have as great an effect as a huge nuclear power program. The TVA was the best investment of the New Deal. It may be that private power would have done as well, but the cheap energy from TVA brought energy to the South. Cheap power is the key to growth; and clearly that will not happen under the Change that we can believe in.

Hold on to your hats, wallets, kids, and groceries — the Deep Greens are taking over. There will be sustainable and fashionable poverty for all, except the Nomenklatura, who will just have to keep on using those jets and living in those big houses, because their work is so important!

Earth Day follow-up

Couldn't leave it alone, could I?

Via the Urbin Report and Ed Driscoll, via Steven Den Beste, here's Ronald Bailey in Reason, back in 2000:

Earth Day, Then and Now

Earth Day 1970 provoked a torrent of apocalyptic predictions. "We have about five more years at the outside to do something," ecologist Kenneth Watt declared to a Swarthmore College audience on April 19, 1970. Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that "civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind." "We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation," wrote Washington University biologist Barry Commoner in the Earth Day issue of the scholarly journal Environment. The day after Earth Day, even the staid New York Times editorial page warned, "Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction." Very Apocalypse Now.

Three decades later, of course, the world hasn't come to an end; if anything, the planet's ecological future has never looked so promising. With half a billion people suiting up around the globe for Earth Day 2000, now is a good time to look back on the predictions made at the first Earth Day and see how they've held up and what we can learn from them. The short answer: The prophets of doom were not simply wrong, but spectacularly wrong.

Paul Ehrlich, who collaborated with Obama science advisor John Holdren, is prominently mentioned. Much more at the link, RTWT.

Also at Urbin Report, George Carlin on "Saving the Planet." NSFW because of language.

Nuclear?

Some have trouble pronouncing it; some can't even think it.

Jerry Taylor at The Corner links to a piece by David Owen (no relation) at The New Yorker, "Economy vs. Environment." Taylor: "[E]conomic growth is the enemy and a return to the pre-industrial age is answer." The recurring refrain of the Deep Greens. Owen goes on and on about how energy prices must be made higher, never mind the hardship that would result. He does have the sense to say

American dependence on fossil fuels isn’t going to end any time soon: solar panels and wind turbines provided only about a half per cent of total U.S. energy consumption in 2007, and they don’t work when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing. Replacing oil is going to require more than determination.

But the word "nuclear" is nowhere to be found in his effusion.

We have a safe source of power that does not emit carbon. Can we use it, please? The refusal of the Greens (including Obama's science advisors) to admit that nuclear power is a viable alternative to fossil fuels, even as they are trying to shut down fossil fuel production, shows that what they really want is widespread misery. Prosperity is the enemy. Or as David Owen says in conclusion,

The ultimate success or failure of Obama’s program, and of the measures that will be introduced in Copenhagen this year, will depend on our willingness, once the global economy is no longer teetering, to accept policies that will seem to be nudging us back toward the abyss.

Oh, yeah, those policies, what about them, that only "seem to be nudging us back toward the abyss"? I would say that's no seeming, it's an actual nudging, or even a shove.

Compare the discussion in comments about the Tata Nano.

Browner appointment is "an arrow aimed at the heart of the American economy"

That line's from Bird Dog, at Maggie's Farm. And it's memorable. I can't get it out of my own head, anyway. Mr. Obama appears to have drunk all of the Al Gore-ian environmental Kool-Aid. The Bird Dog links to a WSJ article: "Mr. Obama is stocking his energy shop with the greenest of greens who want to move fast on a very aggressive climate agenda. Here come the carbon busters."

Moonbattery has this charming picture:


Glenn Reynolds links to John Tierney at the NY Times, who asks, "Does being spectacularly wrong about a major issue in your field of expertise hurt your chances of becoming the presidential science advisor? Apparently not, judging by reports from DotEarth and ScienceInsider that Barack Obama will name John P. Holdren as his science advisor on Saturday."

The reports appear to have panned out, and colleagues at Woods Hole and Harvard, and some other people in Massachusetts, are excited.

Ron Bailey says that "In his salad days, Holdren was a paid-up member of The Limits to Growth club.… Near the beginning of his career, Holdren introduced with his colleague, perennial population alarmist Paul Ehrlich, the concept of the I=PAT equation. Human Impact on the environment is equal to Population x Affluence/consumption x Technology. All of which are supposed to intensify and worsen humanity's impact on the natural world. In the past Holdren has adhered to the common ecologist's disdain for insights from economics in helping solve environmental problems." [Typo in Ehrlich's name corrected by me.]

More Holdren at Solve Climate. And Luboš Motl isn't being coy: "John Holdren is the ultimate example of the pseudointellectual impurities that have recently flooded universities and academies throughout the Western world."

So Browner and Holdren are Deep Greens. Will they be having policy meetings with Paul Watson to determine the optimum method for bringing the world population down to a "sustainable" level, maybe one billion or so? That's a lot of Soylent Green.

In the meantime, the world is growing colder. Are we are getting closer to Fallen Angels all the time? Let's have enormous, expensive, economy-killing programs to stop the Earth from warming, when in fact the Earth is cooling.

Maybe we need to throw another log on the fire, as our ancestors did long ago. (via, via)

Here previously: Energy is the sine qua non of civilization, or even merely taking out the trash.

Update, Dec 24: a follow-up from Tierney: "My post on John P. Holdren’s appointment as presidential science advisor prompted complaints that I was making too much of Dr. Holdren’s loss of a bet to the economist Julian Simon about the price of some metals. But that bet wasn’t just about metals. It was about a fundamental view of how adaptable and innovative humans are, and whether a rich modern society is “sustainable.” Dr. Holdren and his collaborator, Paul Ehrlich, were the pessimists."

Update: Original source of the picture.

Forty-five inches in Deadwood

Too much of this here global warming going on. It's vital that we shut down all industry now. For the children! Except, you know, the ones in those cars, buried in the snow, out on the highway.

Blizzard pummels South Dakota, stranding motorists

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. — As snowfall neared 4 feet in the Black Hills and winds gusting higher than 50 mph continued to howl, state officials had a simple message for anyone thinking of trying to drive in western South Dakota's blizzard: Don't.

And they stressed that the storm, which stranded an unknown numbers of motorists and knocked out power to thousands, would keep causing problems as it moves eastward Friday.

"This is a dangerous storm," Gov. Mike Rounds told reporters in a telephone conference call Thursday evening. "Western South Dakota is basically under a no-travel advisory."

Officials closed a long stretch of Interstate 90, where dozens of vehicles were trapped. Some motorists have been stranded for more than 24 hours, Rounds said, noting that search teams can't get to them because of zero visibility.

"We cannot see a thing in many areas where we're out actually searching for people," said Tom Dravland, state Public Safety secretary, adding that the top speed for some rescue crews was as little as a half-mile per hour.

Solar power, that's what's needed here.

All right, enough snark, seriously now: Since Obama's soon to be in power, and his base is in the cities and on the coasts, will it look like a sensible move to the new administration simply to abandon the interior? For the Deep Greens like Paul Watson of Sea Shepherd, that's a goal. Sort of like "charity begins at home." Population reduction can begin in places where people need power from coal to keep from freezing to death. Knock out the coal, and the project is begun.