Absurd, impractical sustainability precepts are actually a prescription for government control
Guest essay by Paul Driessen
As President Trump downgrades the relevance of Obama era climate
change and anti-fossil fuel policies, many environmentalists are
directing attention to “
sustainable development.”
Like “dangerous manmade climate change,” sustainability reflects poor
understanding of basic energy, economic, resource extraction and
manufacturing principles – and a tendency to emphasize tautologies and
theoretical models as an alternative to readily observable evidence in
the Real World. It also involves well-intended but ill-informed people
being led by ill-intended but well-informed activists who use the
concept to gain greater government control over people’s lives,
livelihoods and living standards.
The most common definition is that we may meet the needs of current
generations only to the extent that doing so will not compromise the
ability of future generations to meet their needs. Sustainability thus
reflects the assertion that we are rapidly depleting finite resources,
and must reduce current needs and wants so as to save raw materials for
future generations.
At first blush, it sounds logical and even ethical. But it requires impossible clairvoyance.
In 1887, when the Hearthstone House became the world’s first home lit
via hydroelectric power, no one did or could foresee that electricity
would dominate, enhance and safeguard our lives in the myriad ways it
does today. Decades later, no one anticipated pure silica fiber optic
cables replacing copper wires.
No one predicted tiny cellular phones with superb digital cameras and
more computing power than a 1990 desktop computer or 3-D printing or
thousands of wind turbines across our fruited plains – or cadmium, rare
earth metals and other raw materials suddenly required to manufacture
these technological wonders.
Mankind advanced at a snail’s pace for thousands of years. As the
modern fossil-fuel industrial era found its footing, progress picked up
at an increasingly breathtaking pace. Today, change is exponential. As
we moved from flint to copper, to bronze, iron, steel and beyond, we
didn’t do so because mankind had exhausted Earth’s supplies of flint,
copper, tin and so on. We did it because we innovated – invented
something better, more efficient or practical. Each advance required
different raw materials.
Who today can foresee what technologies future generations will have
25, 50 or 200 years from now? What raw materials they will need? How we
are supposed to ensure that those families meet their needs?
Why then would we even think of empowering government to regulate
today’s activities today based on the wholly unpredictable technologies,
lifestyles, needs, and resource demands of distant generations? Why
would we ignore or compromise the needs of current generations, to meet
those totally unpredictable future needs – including the needs of
today’s most impoverished, energy-deprived, malnourished people, who
desperately want to improve their lives?
Moreover, we are not going to run out of resources anytime soon. A
1-kilometer fiber optic cable made from 45 pounds of silica (Earth’s
most abundant element) carries thousands of times more information than
an equally long RG-6 cable made from 3,600 pounds of copper, reducing
demand for copper.
In 1947, the world’s proven oil reserves totaled 47 billion barrels.
Over the next 70 years, we consumed hundreds of billions of barrels –
and yet, in 2016 we still had at least 2,800 billion barrels of oil
reserves, including oil sands, oil shales and other unconventional
deposits: at least a century’s worth, plus abundant natural gas.
Constantly improving technologies now let us find and produce oil and
natural gas from deposits that we could not even detect, much less tap
into, just a couple decades ago.
Sustainability dogma also revolves around hatred of fossil fuels, and
a determination to rid the world of them, regardless of any social,
economic or environmental costs of doing so. And we frequently find that
supposedly green, eco-friendly and sustainable alternatives are
frequently anything but.
U.S. ethanol quotas eat up 40% of the nation’s corn, cropland the
size of Iowa, billions of gallons of water, and vast quantities of
pesticides, fertilizers, tractor fuel and natural gas, to produce energy
that drives up food prices, damages small engines and gets one-third
less mileage per gallon than gasoline.
Heavily subsidized wind energy requires standby fossil fuel
generators, ultra-long transmission lines and thus millions of tons of
concrete, steel, copper, rare earth metals and fiberglass. The turbines
create chronic health problems for people living near them and kill
millions of birds and bats – to produce intermittent, wholly unreliable
electricity that
costs up to 250% more than coal-based electricity.
For all that, on a torrid August 2012 day, Great Britain’s 3,500 giant wind turbines generated
a mere 12 megawatts of electricity: 0.032% of the 38,000 MW the country was using at the time.
The United Kingdom also subsidizes several huge
anaerobic digesters,
intended to convert animal manure and other farm waste into
eco-friendly methane for use in generating electricity. But there is
insufficient farm waste. So the digesters are fed with corn (maize),
grass and rye grown on 130,000 acres (four times the size of Washington,
DC), using enormous amounts of water, fertilizer – and of course diesel
fuel to grow, harvest and transport the crops to the digesters. Why not
just drill and frack for natural gas?
That brings us to the political arena, where the terminology is
circular, malleable, infinitely elastic, the perfect tool for activists.
Whatever they support is sustainable; whatever they oppose is
unsustainable; and whatever mantras or protective measures they propose
give them more power and control.
The Club of Rome sought to build a new movement by creating “a common
enemy against whom we can unite” – allegedly looming disasters “caused
by human intervention in natural processes” and requiring “changed
attitudes and behavior” to avoid global calamities: global warming and
resource depletion.
“Building an environmentally sustainable future requires restricting
the global economy, dramatically changing human reproductive behavior,
and altering values and lifestyles,” said Worldwatch Institute founder
Lester Brown. “Doing this quickly requires nothing short of a
revolution.”
“Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle
class – involving high meat intake, the use of fossil fuels, electrical
appliances, home and workplace air conditioning, and suburban housing –
are not sustainable,” Canadian arch-environmentalist Maurice Strong
declared.
“Minor shifts in policy, moderate improvements in laws and
regulations, rhetoric offered in lieu of genuine change,” former Vice
President Al Gore asserted – “these are all forms of appeasement,
designed to satisfy the public’s desire to believe that sacrifice,
struggle and a wrenching transformation of society will not be
necessary.” Environmental activist Daniel Sitarz agreed, saying: “Agenda
21 proposes an array of actions intended to be implemented by every
person on Earth. Effective execution of Agenda 21 will require a
profound reorientation of all humans, unlike anything the world has ever
experienced.”
“Sustainable development,” the National Research Council declaimed in
a 2011 report, “raises questions that are not fully or directly
addressed in U.S. law or policy, including how to define and control
unsustainable patterns of production and consumption, and how to
encourage the development of sustainable communities, biodiversity
protection, clean energy, environmentally sustainable economic
development, and climate change controls.” In fact, said Obama science
advisor John Holdren, we cannot even talk about sustainability without
talking about politics, power, and control. Especially control.
Of course, the activists, politicians and regulators feel little
pain, as they enjoy salaries and perks paid by taxpayers and
foundations, fly to UN and other conferences at posh 5-star resorts
around the world, and implement agendas that control, redesign and
transform other people’s lives.
It is We the Governed – especially working class and poor citizens –
who pay the price, with the world’s poorest families paying the highest
price. We can only hope the Trump Administration and Congress will
dismantle and defund sustainable development, the
alter ego of cataclysmic manmade climate change.
Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (
www.CFACT.org), and author of
Eco-Imperialism: Green power – Black death.