OPINION: Ten Environmentalist Lies

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he first Earth Day was organized in 1970 in response to growing public concern for the environment. In an interesting twist of ironic historical trivia, the first Earth Day was founded by a guy who brutally murdered his girlfriend and hid her body in a suitcase in a closet for more than twenty years. Some of these concerns may have justified back in 1970. For example, back in 1969, an oil slick along an industrialized stretch of the Cuyahoga River in Ohio caught fire, and in the process, generated enough national media attention to motivate a need to reduce water pollution. Similarly, in coastal cities in California, most notably in Los Angeles, the exhaust from leaded gasoline created air pollution so dense you couldn’t see more than a few blocks away.

We’ve come a long way as a nation in terms of environmental responsibility in 55 years. This month, Americans will reflect once again on Earth Day April 22 and challenged to distinguish between legitimate environmental priorities and those chosen and forced upon us by government or special interests with ulterior motives who constantly play upon the public sentiment of environmental concern & responsibility.

Here are ten commonly promoted and accepted fabrications of the truth where environmentalism has been misused & abused; with consequences which have either been of no benefit whatsoever or have actually caused environmental harm.

✪ ONE: We Are In A Climate Crisis

We may as well start with the biggest and most controversial environmentalist claim, that our planet is in immediate danger of catastrophic climate change. The problem with this claim is two-fold; first, there remains vigorous and suppressed debate over whether there is authentic data to support such claim. Any legitimate questions are often met with “The science is settled” or hyperbolic emotion responses which preclude any serious discussion. There is more than ample evidence average global temperatures are not rapidly increasing if they are even increasing at all. Instead, there are numerous indications they are following natural cycles of variation. There is also strong evidence that extreme weather events are not increasing; but rather, our technology & ability to detect and monitor them have improved. Also factored into the mix, is the fact population & development have led more people to live in places that are particularly vulnerable to extreme weather. Second, even if there was some truth to the claims of extremist climate catastrophists, it is not in any way possible to precipitously transform our entire energy infrastructure. The technology isn’t ready, the funding isn’t available and most nations will not participate.

✪ TWO: There Are Too Many People On The Planet

Based on popular extrapolations back in 1970, this may have appeared to be the case then because populations worldwide at that time were rapidly growing. However today, in almost every nation, the inverse is now true: birthrates are dropping and well below necessary replacement levels. Even in those nations which continue to experience rapid population growth, the overall birthrate is still slowing to follow the same pattern of decline. The United Nations now estimates the total global population to top out at around 10 billion people, after which it is projected to decline. At this point, it appears the world population may already peaked at 8 billion. The rapid population growth we’ve experienced over the past two centuries made possible by both the Industrial and information revolutions, where the global population octupled from 1 billion in 1804 to over 8 billion by 2024, is over. There is not one current trend to be found anywhere on Earth to contradicts this pattern. Humanity may actually be facing a future of too few people instead of too many.

✪ THREE: We Are Running Out Of Oil & “Fossil” Fuels

While there is much contoversy surrounding this particular view, the situation is nowhere close to what was famously predicted in 1956 by American geologist M. Hubbert, who claimed oil production in the U.S. would peak by 1970 and then slide into a permanent decline. Of course, that hasn’t happened. In the U.S. and around the world, new technologies and discoveries have placed total reserves of oil, along with natural gas and coal, at record highs despite increasing demand. According to the authoritative Statistical Review on Global Energy, based on current consumption, proven reserves could supply oil for at least another 61 years, natural gas for 50 and coal for 208. Of course, this information grossly understates the bigger picture; because proven and recoverable reserves are being expanded and developed all the time. “Unproven” reserves, waiting to be discovered, could easily double the amount of remaining supply time. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t continue to research new sources of energy; but it also means we have a time runway of at least a century or more to sort tall of this out.

✪ FOUR: Biofuels Are Renewable & Sustainable

Nothing could be further from the truth. Biofuel can never supply more than a small fraction of our energy requirements because it is so expensive to produce and returns less bang on the Buck. Attempts by government to scale it beyond a niche product have produced catastrophic results.For example, in California the current yield of ethanol from a crop of corn stands at not quite 500 gallons per acre. However, Californians consumed 13.6 billion gallons of gasoline in 2023. Since ethanol yields 33 percent less energy per gallon than conventional gasoline, completely replacing gasoline with carbon-neutral ethanol would require 20.3 billion gallons of ethanol production, which in turn would require 63,400 square miles of irrigated farmland and over 120 million acre-feet of water per crop. To put all of this in proper perspective, California’s current, entire expanse of irrigated farmland only totals around 14,000 square miles, and California’s entire agricultural sector only consumes around 30 million acre-feet of water per year. Worldwide, biofuel crops already consume an estimated 500,000 square miles while only offsetting 2 percent of the global consumption of transportation fuel. Biofuels provide a very poor return on investment.

✪ FIVE: Offshore Wind Energy Is Both Renewable & Sustainable

Absolutely not. Another wild and deliberate distortion of the truth. Wind turbine blades, on land or offshore, routinely kill many magnificent & endangered birds, along with bats and insects. Offshore, there are additional harmful impacts of wind energy. The electromagnetic fields generated from undersea cables produce birth deformities in marine life and disrupt the navigation & orientation abilities of some species of fish. Their low-frequency operational noise disrupts sound cues used by fish for mating, spawning and navigation. The turbines “increase sea surface temperatures and alter upper-ocean hydrodynamics in ways scientists do not yet understand” and “whip up sea sediment and generate highly turbid wakes that are 30-150 meters wide and several kilometers in length, having a major impact on primary production by phytoplankton, which are the base of marine food chains.”

California’s master alternative energy plan id to install 25,000 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity in the form of new wind farms floating 20 miles offshore. At 10 megawatts of generation each, California’s treasured marine ecosystem will be disrupted by the presence of somewhere between 2,500 floating wind turbines, each one nearly 1,000 feet high. They will also need 7,500 of tethering, support cables descending 4,000 feet to the bottom of the seafloor, along with 2,500 high-voltage cables. Expect California ratepayers and taxpayers to subsidize this project that could cost $300 billion or more to build systems which may have a lifespan of only 10-20 years.

✪ SIX: Renewables Are Renewable

No, quite simply they’re not. The renewables currently most in favor with environmentalists are solar and wind farms with battery farms to store the intermittently generated electricity. Just the consumption of natural resources to build these renewables is hardly sustainable. Using data from the International Energy Agency, geopolitical writer Peter Ziehan calculated just the mineral requirements for power generation, comparing renewables to natural gas in terms of kilograms of minerals per megawatt of capacity. Offshore wind: 16,000 kg/MW, onshore wind: 10,000 kg/MW, solar photovoltaic: 7,000 kg/MW, and natural gas: 2,000 kg/MW. Compounding this disparity is the fact that natural gas power plants can operate for 60 years or more, whereas solar installations are operable for only for 30 years maximum and wind turbines for substantially less than that, depending on where they’re situated. As for EVs, Ziehan calculated kilograms of rare earth minerals required per vehicle, with EVs requiring over 200 kg/vehicle, compared to conventional cars at only 35 kg/vehicle. It’s easy enough to see what all of this means. The rush to replace conventional energy sources with “renewables” is contradictory and has ignited the expansion of worldwide mining in nations with minimal environmental protections.

✪ SEVEN: Alternative Sources Can Replace Oil

Not happening anytime soon. Worldwide, in 2022, 82 percent of global energy was still created from petroleum based fuels. For everyone on Earth to consume half as much energy per capita as Americans, global energy production will have to double the current rate of output. Based on those two cold facts, petroleum based energy is still going to be around for a very long time. Even these statistics greatly understate that challenge: in 2023, most of the non-petroleum energy produced was from either nuclear (4.0 percent) or hydroelectric (6.8 percent) sources, leaving only 7.5 percent from allegedly renewable sources. And of the remaining 7.5 percent “renewables,” two-thirds of it was biofuel production, which should not be considered renewable; or, at the very least, must be considered already at maximum capacity. That leaves only about 2.5 percent of worldwide energy production coming from renewables; primarily wind, solar, and geothermal sources.

✪ EIGHT: New Housing Must Fit Into The Footprint Of Existing Cities

This is not at all possible for California, nor for the United States; and not even worldwide. Nonetheless, urban containment has been enforced in California ever since we stopped investing in expanding our energy, water, and transportation infrastructure, resulting in 94 percent of the population living on only 5 percent of the land. However, urban containment isn’t necessary to ensure enough farm production. Even in India, the most densely populated large nation on Earth, where there are 2,700 people per square mile of farmland, the country is still a net food exporter. In California, the government insistence for urban containment is truly ridiculous. Building new homes for ten million new California residents on quarter-acre lots, with four-person households, and allocating an equivalent amount for schools, parks, roads, and retail and commercial areas would only consume 1,953 square miles. This would only increase California’s urban footprint from 7,800 to 9,700 square miles, i.e., from 5.0 percent to 6.2 percent of all land in the state. The global trend is people voluntarily migrating to cities at the same time as the global population is expected to begin to decline within a few decades. There will be plenty of room for farms and wilderness even if cities are permitted to expand. Keeping cities bottled up is misanthropic and misguided, creating artificially high home prices and unwanted overcrowding.

✪ NINE: Mass Transit Is Necessary To Achieve Sustainability

It’s hard to imagine such a claim more at odds with reality. Mass transit works in extremely dense urban areas where most jobs are located in a central core. With rare exceptions, such as Manhattan, most metropolitan areas no longer have this hub-and-spoke model, which renders economically viable mass transit extremely difficult. Then there are the challenges introduced during the COVID pandemic, which drove millions of riders out of mass transit to either commute in private cars or work from home. Unfortunately mass transit ridership has never completely recovered.

An additional barrier to the readoption of mass transit is the fact most cities are unwilling to police and remove disruptive individuals from the buses and trains, rendering their transit systems too dangerous for potential passengers to consider. Finally, with new work-from-home technology which will only expand and improve, innovations are waiting just around the corner which will enable smart cars to convoy at higher speeds and increase the capacity of existing roads. Why would someone ride mass transit when instead they can relax as a clean and safe smart vehicle transports them from point-to-point with no interruptions? Why should taxpayers continue to subsidize mass transit?

✪ TEN: Wilderness Areas Are Sacred

This mantra has pushed more good than harm into the wilderness. Litigation pursuant to the Endangered Species Act has severely restricted, if not put a complete stop to most logging, mining and energy explorations on public lands, although the current White House administration is now in the process of changing that. However, during the past 40 years, because fires were suppressed and logging didn’t remove new growth, our national forests have become overgrown, resulting in catastrophic seasonal fires which are conveniently blamed on “climate change.” Similarly, ESA litigation and environmentalist-inspired regulations put a stop to dredging in California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, which is the only way to maintain deep, cool water channels favored by salmon since the construction of levees in the 1800s caused silt deposits to accumulate in their migration routes. Of course, it’s important to protect truly endangered species, but environmentalists often end up creating much bigger problems than they are trying to solve.

Poverty in most of the Third World could be alleviated if environmental restrictions on energy development were lifted. However as it currently stands, citizens in poorer, non-industrialized nations are cutting down their forests for firewood, hunting wild game for food and poaching dwindling herds of elephants, rhinos, lions, and other precious and endangered species for sale to international smugglers. How we manage our wilderness areas must be revisited and re-evaluated with a reality-based emphasis on results, not environmental ideology.

While the total forest cover in the world has been in decline for many centuries; over the past 40 years, it has been increasing again. This is the result of several factors: reforestation efforts, migration to urban areas, huge improvements in agricultural productivity, which takes excessive farmland out of production to allow for forests to reclaim the land; and perhaps an even slightly elevated atmospheric CO₂, which enhances plant growth.

While the ideals of environmentalism seem noble and vital enough, the policies and decisions promulgated in the name of that environmentalism are all too often detrimental and harmful to the environment. The mad rush to develop renewables and the power of the “climate crisis” narrative to deter rational cost/benefit analysis of environmentalist policies are current examples. The impact of misguided environmentalist policies and decisions not only affect the fate of wildlife and wilderness or the health of global ecosystems. It is also carries profound economic consequences. It has also become a means by which governments can provide for large transfers of wealth to entrenched special interests which thrive on ever escalating regulations. Worldwide, entire industrial sectors have been consolidated if not outright eliminated, costing their nations the resilience and affordability that only a truly diverse and competitive economy can deliver. Environmentalism, as it is now being practiced in the 21st Century, is primarily another weaponized arm of globalism, with shades of paternalism and colonialism overshadowing its few virtues.

Unfortunately, the ten environmental lies identified above form the fundamental premises of modern environmentalism, and are deeply flawed as well as exploited by special interest groups, corporations and governments for profit and control. If there is any real challenge presented in environmentalism, it is to restore environmentalism to honorable roots by recognizing and rejecting these flawed premises wherever and whenever they are applied. We must restructure our regulatory environment to eliminate the incentives for opportunism and manipulation. We must nurture our prosperity through diverse and competitive national economies, recognizing that through such prosperity, we will discover the adequate resources to invest in genuinely clean and sustainable energy technology, as well as the means to engage in practical environmental protection.

If Earth Day is to remain relevant, we have to transform environmentalism from a manipulative tool used to corner markets and and limit the freedoms of people. ✪

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