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Showing posts with label climate change. Show all posts
Showing posts with label climate change. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 14, 2023

Why Energy Is Becoming Less Reliable—and Less Affordable—All Around the World

In the book Green Tyranny—a fantastic history of the environmental alarmism movement—author Rupert Darwall lays responsibility for the beginning of this movement at the feet of the Germans and the Swedes.

In 1967, a Swedish scientist published the first ever “theory” on acid rain. Four years later, Bert Bolin, a Swede who would go on to chair the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), wrote the first-ever government report on acid rain.

It was a typical government report. Ninety pages long, it starts out with certainty: “The emission of sulfur into the atmosphere . . . has proved to be a major environmental problem.” Fifty pages later, however, Bolin admits to some doubt when he says, “It is very difficult to prove that damage . . . has in fact occurred.” Nevertheless, the government report concludes decisively, “A reduction in the total emissions both in Sweden and in adjacent countries is required” (emphasis added).

It was in Germany where environmentalists and antinuclear activists entered into holy matrimony. Scaling back on nuclear power, making life difficult for owners of fossil fuel power plants, and subsidizing unreliable and inefficient solar and wind farms has been Germany’s consistent policy in the decades since. The result has been skyrocketing energy prices and an increasingly unreliable electrical grid. German engineers—having designed a bit of redundancy into their system—had historically never had problems with their electrical grid. However, by 2012, the country experienced one thousand brownouts. In 2013, that number was up to twenty-five hundred, and it has continued getting worse since. As a result, Germany’s industrial base, always a world leader, has been sadly declining as businesses choose to leave the country in search of more reliable electrical pastures.

In 1988, the IPCC was established during a meeting in Geneva, presided over by many of the same characters who’d been leading Sweden and Germany’s environmentalist movements during the preceding decades.

One of the primary tasks assigned to the IPCC is to issue periodic “assessment reports” about the state of global climate change. These reports are hundreds of pages long and can be extremely technical. For attention-deficit-challenged politicians and journalists, these reports are issued with an accompanying summary. As a matter of routine, this summary mischaracterizes the substance and even the conclusions of the actual report. It is also regularly subjected to political meddling; for instance, when the IPCC issued its fifth assessment report in 2014, the German delegate to the IPCC insisted that language related to a pause or hiatus in the rise of global temperature be removed because “it would confuse German voters.”

Moreover, the leaders of the environmentalist movement have historically been wrong on just about everything. For laughs:

  1. 1989—the UN predicted that entire nations would be “wiped off the face of the Earth” by rising sea levels by 2000.
  2. 2006—Al Gore said humans may have only ten years to save the planet from “turning into a total frying pan.”
  3. 2018—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez declared that the “world is going to end in twelve years if we don’t address climate change.”

Despite all this, the emotional pull of “save the world” propaganda remains powerful, and the environmentalist agenda marches on.

One of the biggest goals of this agenda has been to get us off fossil-fuel-generated electricity and onto wind-generated and solar-generated electricity. Admittedly, environmentalists have been extremely successful at installing large numbers of wind turbines and solar panels. They’ve been stunningly unsuccessful, though, in the pursuit of their primary goal of “getting us off” fossil fuels.

Despite massive growth in the generating capacity of wind and solar farms, fossil-fuel-powered electric plants remain an irreplaceable component of reliable electrical grids. Wind and solar power, as technology currently stands, cannot adequately substitute for power from fossil fuels. This is because wind and solar power suffer from the insurmountable problem of intermittency—wind turbines don’t work when it’s not windy, and solar panels don’t work when the sun’s not shining.

Some have suggested that we could build large-scale battery storage facilities that, on sunny or windy days, could be used to bank excess electricity for later use and thus overcome this problem. Elon Musk recently even floated the idea of building a large-scale battery storage facility powered by wind and solar farms. It was going to cost $5 billion, require more lithium batteries than currently exist in the world, and be capable of storing about five minutes of United States’ electricity demand. Large-scale battery storage is simply not yet viable.

Another fun fact about wind and solar power and battery storage is that storing electricity in batteries is ten thousand times more expensive than storing oil in tanks or coal in piles.

Wind and solar farms have clearly added nothing of value. But it’s worse than that—they actively work to our detriment. For an electrical grid to work reliably, the supply of electricity must be constantly equalized with demand. If power plants are generating more electricity than is demanded by consumers, the electrical grid can be overloaded, and critical infrastructure can be catastrophically damaged.

On the other hand, if supply is unable to keep up with demand, the result is blackouts and brownouts. To deal with this physical constraint, power plants have historically been designed to serve two complementary purposes: baseline-load generation and variable-load generation. Given that a certain amount of electrical demand can be taken as constant, baseline generators are designed to operate reliably and inexpensively to meet that demand. Spikes in demand are handled by variable generators.

Wind and solar power function as neither. As opposed to baseline-load or variable-load generators, wind and solar farms are random and unreliable generators of electricity.

It’s true that on sunny or windy days, they can produce massive amounts of electricity. The problem is that this drives up supply regardless of demand—so when demand is not sufficiently high to account for the power generation from wind and solar farms, variable-load and even baseline-load power plants must throttle down their power generation to protect grid infrastructure from overload.

For baseline-load plants especially, which weren’t designed to operate that way, the negative effects on maintenance and equipment lifetimes are significant. In real time, we are seeing the reliable portion of our electrical grid wearing out faster than it otherwise would.

The state of Texas makes the point. Texas holds the title of being the number one wind state in the US. For years, officials have been pouring billions of dollars into the installation of thousands of windmills across the state. To connect these wind farms to the grid required thirty-six hundred miles of transmission lines. Just the cost of those transmission lines was greater than $6.5 billion. The reliable portion of Texas’ electrical grid was starved for funds to pay for this political misallocation of resources.

As a result, routine maintenance has increasingly been ignored, and emergency maintenance has become more and more routine. When Texas was hit by a winter storm in the winter of 2021, it caused an unexpected increase in winter electric demand. Unfortunately, at the time, a number of critical power plants were down for emergency maintenance, the grid was unable to keep up, and hundreds tragically died.

As if all that weren’t enough, there is also the corruption and crony capitalism aspect of wind and solar. During times when wind and solar farms are ramping up supply, the wholesale price of electricity naturally falls. This leads to the owners of coal and natural gas power plants making very little money or sometimes even losing money on windy and sunny days.

On the other hand, because politicians want to force wind and solar power to work regardless of market realities, wind and power farm owners earn a subsidized rate for the electricity they generate regardless of the wholesale rate. Owners of wind and solar farms are therefore insulated from the consequences that their arbitrary and politically incentivized production of electricity has on the market.

To make this point one final way, in places where solar and wind power are pervasive, both the quality of the electrical grid and the cost of electricity rank poorly against places where solar and wind are scarce. Germany has increased its wind and solar generating capacity by thirteen times from 1999–2012; they’ve also recently announced the shutdown of their last nuclear power plant, and their cost per kilowatt-hour has risen to nearly fifty cents.

In the Carolinas, we pay between six and ten cents per kilowatt-hour of electricity. Households and business owners would no doubt be hard hit if their power bills were to increase by five to eight times. Unfortunately, that seems to be the direction we’re going. In North Carolina, we pay 18 percent more for electricity than do our neighbors in South Carolina, simply because North Carolina politicians insist on increasing solar production, while South Carolina remains primarily reliant on fossil fuel and nuclear power.

Certainly, there are very real problems related to the current state of things. However, the problem is not that we’re facing fossil-fuel-induced climate change so bad that drastic action is necessary to “save the planet.” Rather, the problem we’re facing is the reaction to this alarmism, which is leading to the degradation of the electrical grid we depend upon for our modern lifestyles.

A promising path forward in finding a solution to this problem is found in Alex Epstein’s great book Fossil Future.

His book’s overall thesis is that our strategy should be to pursue a change in rhetoric. To do this, we should frame our arguments about this issue from the standpoint of what is best for human flourishing.

On that front, he lays out three facts:

  1. Fossil fuels are a uniquely cost-effective source of energy.
  2. Cost-effective energy is essential to human flourishing.
  3. Innumerable  people are suffering and dying for a lack of access to cost-effective energy.

Therefore, rather than insist on working to scale back our consumption of fossil fuels, we should actively seek to increase it—especially in the poorest parts of the world.

Beyond this brilliant thesis, Epstein’s book is a fantastic scientific and historical refutation of all things environmentalist alarmism. Perhaps the best example of that is his demolition of Al Gore’s infamous “hockey stick” curve. First, he demonstrates clearly that Gore’s graph, which shows Earth’s temperature as being constant for centuries only to spike up since the Industrial Revolution of the 1850s, is false. Second, he demonstrates that there is a hockey stick curve that is true and that people should be stupefied by—the graph of human flourishing over time.

For centuries, human flourishing had been flat in terms of life expectancy, standard of living, access to electricity, and caloric intake. Only since the 1850s, when humanity started burning fossil fuels, has all of this changed. Since then, we’ve seen human flourishing—by any measure one would choose—spike up in exactly this same “hockey stick” fashion.

In conclusion, market economics leads to business owners making informed and calculated investments in things like LED lighting technology for purposes of raising their bottom line as well. Market economics will also lead to the development of a robust and reliable electrical grid. Political economics, on the other hand, leads to corruption, cronyism, an electrical grid on the verge of failure, higher costs of energy, and a top-down “solution” to a fake crisis that is causing diminished human flourishing.

Just like everything else, in the case of energy efficiency as well as energy production, it is best to trust the market.

This article originally appeared on Mises Wire.

Jared Wall
Jared Wall

Jared Wall is currently employed as a Sales Engineer working for Southpoint Solutions based out of Fort Mill, SC. Follow Jared at jaredwall.com where he shares semi-regular anecdotes from his decade+ career in energy efficiency via his email newsletter.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Why Energy Is Becoming Less Reliable—and Less Affordable—All Around the World

Wednesday, October 5, 2022

Why the Dutch Farmer Protest Is Your Cause, Too

It was a standoff in the province of Friesland in the Netherlands on the evening of July 5. Police fired gunshots at a band of farmers who were reportedly driving tractors into officers and their vehicles to get past a blockade and onto the highway.

A tractor was hit by the gunfire, and three arrests were made. This was just one heated event among countless during a campaign of tens of thousands of protesters that has now become an international showdown between farmers and environmental regulators with global and potentially historic implications.

The Dutch farmer protests started with an initial bout of demonstrations in the Netherlands on October 1, 2019 in response to new carbon emissions reduction legislation that disproportionately impacted farmers.

Then, on June 10 of this year, the Dutch government unveiled more extreme measures targeted directly at the agricultural industry. “Farms next to nature reserves must cut nitrogen output by 70%,” the Economist reported. “About 30% of the country’s cows and pigs will have to go, along with a big share of cattle and dairy farms.”

In response to this new legislation, about 40,000 Dutch farmers protested outside government buildings and the homes of ministers and drove hundreds of tractors to blockade food distribution centers including warehouses and grocery stores. Throughout July the movement spread to Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland, and other nations, each with farmers taking to the streets in repudiation of their governments’ measures to reduce the scale and output of the agricultural industry.

So what exactly is each side of this dispute fighting for?

The Netherlands, being the world’s second largest exporter of agricultural goods after the United States, is among Earth’s most productive farming centers but is also therefore one of the largest polluters.

“The Netherlands has become an agricultural giant by showing what the future of farming could look like,” according to a National Geographic article titled “This Tiny Country Feeds the World.” But as the Economist reports, “The Netherlands is the biggest nitrogen polluter in the EU.”

The farm animals that will likely soon be regulated out of existence produce manure which mixes with urine and releases the nitrogen compound ammonia. This can harm wildlife and disrupt sensitive ecosystems when it leaks into nearby rivers and lakes.

But there are simply no other known methods of producing such bountiful agricultural output with the resources available to the Dutch farmers. So this is a tradeoff between protecting sensitive ecosystems on the one hand, and on the other hand maintaining a thriving Dutch agricultural industry that is able to support its workers while providing the market with maximally affordable products.

“We have to move away from the low-cost model of food production,” said MP Tjeerd de Groot of the Democrats 66 party, which is part of the Dutch coalition government. “It’s time to restore nature, climate and air, and in some areas that may mean there is no more place for intensive farmers there.”

And according to DutchNews.nl, “Dutch agriculture has to become a lot less efficient or the environment will suffer even more, say agro-environmental scientists.”

If this regulatory crackdown on Dutch farmers were an isolated and unusual event, the effects on food availability, food prices, and farmer wages would be bad enough (see the next section). But given the political circumstances currently faced by farmers and those in other industries that are being heavily blamed for environmental destruction, a 30 percent reduction in cows and pigs is likely to be just the beginning.

The deliberate move away from efficient and low-cost farming is in line with a broader global initiative to minimize and reorganize most industrial activity. And that initiative is known as ESG.

As Dan Sanchez has delineated, “environmental, social and corporate governance” (ESG) policies have been around in their codified form since 2004 when top financial institutions were tasked by the United Nations with developing guidelines for reforming the financial sector through “environmental, social and corporate governance.” The evident goal was to skew the global economy’s capital investment toward firms willing to fall in line with the environmental and social values of the powers that be.

Since its invention in 2004, and especially in just the last few years, ESG has become a mainstream form of increasingly-state-backed governance that has thoroughly realigned incentives throughout the economy. In December 2021, Reuters named 2021 “the year of ESG investing,” and by April 2022, Bloomberg reported that, “Few corners of the financial universe have been surrounded by as much marketing froth as ESG, which by some estimates represents more than $40 trillion in assets.”

ESG funds by definition prioritize the moral values of their controllers rather than focusing purely on profitability. And many of those political aims, such as race and sex quotas on corporate boards and the mass curtailing of the energy industry, are at odds with maximizing production and minimizing costs for investors, workers, and customers alike. This might explain why ESG funds are underperforming badly.

And such will be the fate of the Dutch farming industry as investors and entrepreneurs incorporate the fact that efficient industrial agriculture has fallen out of favor among those who wield the powers of political reward and punishment. “For my son, where can he find a living and know what will be allowed in 10 years?” asked Erik Stegink, a protesting pig farmer in the Dutch village of Bathmen.

Such drastic hampering of Holland’s farming industry, both directly and indirectly through the hampering of connected industries such as energy, will put thousands of farmers out of work, reduce food availability, and increase food prices internationally at a time when food insecurity is on the rise.

According to a statement that the White House released in June, “Many of our neighbors rely significantly on imports for food and are particularly vulnerable to rising food costs. The [Western Hemisphere] is experiencing the highest spike in food prices in a generation.”

The publication specifies that between 2014 and 2019 the number of people facing severe food insecurity nearly doubled to more than 90 million in Latin America and the Caribbean. About a third of Venezuelians are food-insecure, while 50 percent of their children under five are showing signs of malnutrition. The number of people facing food insecurity in Honduras nearly doubled last year.

The ongoing food crisis in Sri Lanka is a particularly gruesome display of just how tragic the results of heavy farming regulation can be. About 90 percent of Sri Lankan families are skipping meals due to widespread food shortages and food price inflation of roughly 60 percent.

“It’s a scary turnaround for a middle-income country that once faced no problems feeding a population of 22 million people,” Bloomberg reports. And why did it happen? There are many reasons, but as Bloomberg explains, a major one is that, “In April 2021, the government, led by President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, banned synthetic fertilizer imports to push the country toward organic farming.”

The Dutch economy and most Dutch farmers have deep enough coffers that they probably won’t suffer (for now) from the drastic food insecurity that many poorer countries are experiencing. They will have the luxury of cutting back their quality of life and their children’s futures in other ways instead, as will most of the Americans whose grocery store prices will rise as a result of the Dutch agricultural exports becoming scarcer. But manufactured scarcity and price increases will likely mean immediate starvation for many at the margins in places like Sri Lanka and Latin America.

As some of the farmers have pointed out, there is a case to be made that advancing agricultural progress rather than obstructing it would ultimately have better environmental impacts, not worse. This is because innovation rather than impact reduction has often proven the clearest path to sustainability. And innovation requires that there is capital to invest in new processes and experimentation.

“Cars were very polluting but they had a chance to make cars less polluting with innovation. That is what we want,” Dutch farmers party founder MP Caroline van der Plas explained. And improvements to automobile sustainability are exemplary of the rule, not the exception.

The history of industrial wealth creation and its environmental impacts shows consistently that new wealth tends to improve people’s ability to adapt to a changing environment at least as much as the corresponding environmental changes are problematic for human welfare. The economic datasets known as the Kuznets curves suggest that, at least in modern times, starving people who are focused on the short-term concerns of surviving another month actually tend to damage their environment more than relatively wealthy people who can afford to invest in their long-term wellbeing.

So how is one to decide whether agricultural progress is worth its cost in ecological disruption? The answer becomes clearer when you take the two opposing goals to their logical conclusions.

Agriculture will always disrupt ecosystems and cause pollution, but if it is allowed to flourish it can also make up for that by continuing to improve through innovation as it already has been for centuries, and by making humankind wealthy enough to endure an ever-expanding range of potential environmental conditions, which will eventually be necessary anyway.

By contrast, there is no good ending to the story of limiting and reducing the ability of the farming industry, possibly humans’ most important industry, to produce food. The less food civilization has, the less possible it will be to adapt to changing climate conditions. And since agriculture will always affect its environment, the goal of minimizing the environmental impact of agriculture and other industrial activities is one that will never be complete until everyone starves.

Ecological change is a constant of biological reality—but humans remaining well fed is certainly not. And that hasn’t changed in modern times, as is demonstrated by the 20th century history of mass starvations caused by central planning in places like China, Cambodia, and the Soviet Union.

The Nobel Prize winning economist Friedrich Hayek once wrote that, “The more the state ‘plans’ the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.” Dutch statists preventing farmers from growing food is a good example of this. It will make planning their budgets, careers, and livelihoods more difficult for the farmers who are being regulated, but it will likely make such planning more difficult for individuals all over the world as well.

Saul Zimet
Saul Zimet

Saul Zimet was a Hazlitt Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education and a graduate student in economics at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Why the Dutch Farmer Protest Is Your Cause, Too

Tuesday, August 23, 2022

Sri Lanka’s Food Crisis Reveals the Dangers of Environmental Planning

On July 14, after months of economic and social unrest, Sri Lanka’s President Gotabaya Rajapaksa resigned in disgrace and fled to Singapore, leaving in his wake an economic crisis and a food shortage.

How Rajapaksa’s fate was sealed is not complicated.

You probably heard that Sri Lanka adopted an all-organic approach to agriculture, banning the import of regular fertilizer and fuel because activists assured the government that organic farming was the future. As a result, in merely one year Sri Lanka went from an exporter of rice to an importer. Sri Lanka was not a wealthy country to begin with, and the organic experiment—combined with Covid-19 and government lockdowns—plunged about half a million people into poverty and caused prices to surge. (Inflation is running well over 50 percent, the BBC notes.)

It is a classic example where a supposedly “green” policy was implemented with a lot of fanfare, achieved very little, and created a lot of suffering.

Moreover, such environmental overzealousness is not limited to countries like Sri Lanka. Rich countries have their share of poorly-thought-through “sustainable” initiatives that create a lot of misery and achieve little good. It’s just that rich countries have capital (or license to print dollars and euros) to hide the effects of bad policies.

Consider the current issue of high energy prices. Sure, there are some unexpected factors, like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. However, expensive energy is largely a product of bad policies across the world.

In the last decade, oil and gas production in the US increased significantly, in large part due to innovation, particularly hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”). This growth could have continued, lowering fuel prices at home and selling the excess oil and gas to Europe or other countries. However, green-minded policymakers have canceled or stalled a number of investment projects, such as the Keystone XL Pipeline, the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, and others.

In addition, there are signs that the oil and gas industry is reluctant to invest a lot of money into new projects. It could be that the industry fears even more zealous policies against fossil fuels in the future. After all, would you want to invest in this sector when the government promises to eliminate fossil fuel use altogether?

Most importantly, obstacles to oil and gas exploration in the US does little to reduce consumption of fossil fuels in the US or globally - oil and gas are merely acquired in other places, sometimes with much worse environmental records, e.g. Venezuela.

Moving over to Europe, Germany is another country where unreasonable energy policies are wreaking havoc. Sure, the cuts in Russian supplied gas is the most visible issue, since Germany is very dependent on Russian gas. But this is in part due to German policies, which actively aimed to eliminate coal production and reduce coal consumption in favor of imported natural gas.

At least changing from coal to natural has some sense in terms of climate change: in general coal has more CO2 emissions than natural gas. Although one could wonder whether relatively cleaner fuel is the right price for somewhat reduced CO2 emissions in exchange for dependence on natural gas supplied by Russia.

However there is little practical justification for the German approach to nuclear power. German politicians chose to close working nuclear power plants (the last ones will shut down in 2022). Moreover, in truly zealous fashion, some politicians are against allowing German nuclear plants to come back online even as the country faces a true energy emergency. They prefer imposing energy rationing to industries or telling people to turn the thermostat a couple degrees down.

Climate change politics could explain the resistance to coal, but not the opposition to nuclear. This latter is likely a combination of the legacy of the Green movement’s hostility to nuclear power, which goes back to the 1970s (long before climate change battles), and general distaste for development and industry.

If you think the policies that impede development are only limited to fossil fuels and nuclear— just you wait. Resistance to renewable energy is beginning to rear its head too. Some of the opposition to renewable energy is legitimate, e.g. not all electricity produced on a windy day can be accommodated by an electric grid without major investment. Some rests on the "I-don't-like-the-way-it-looks" sentiment, which some describe as "visual pollution."

All these cases are politician-produced disasters that impede man-made progress. Synthetic fertilizer made Sri-Lanka self-sufficient in food, but the government banned it. Indigenous energy sources could heat German homes, but politicians prohibited them. American oil and gas could make fuel affordable and power the free-world, but politicians on the fringe impede their development.

The Nobel Prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek once said "The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design."

This is demonstrably true and a warning to overconfident politicians, aspiring social engineers, and green zealots. If they don't trust logic and famous dead economists, they should at least learn from experience—blatant mistakes carried out right now for all the world to see.

Banning synthetic fertilizer will result in less food. Impeding oil production will cause higher fuel prices. Shutting down power plants will cause blackouts. All of this is logical, obvious, and inevitable. It's just that the effects of these policies take longer to manifest in rich countries. In poor countries, like Sri-Lanka, the effects of bad policies are tragically visible almost instantly.

This Epoch Times article was republished with permission.

Zilvinas Silenas
Zilvinas Silenas

Zilvinas Silenas became President of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) in May 2019. He served from 2011-2019 as the President of the Lithuanian Free Market Institute (LFMI), bringing the organization and its free-market policy reform message to the forefront of Lithuanian public discourse.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Sri Lanka’s Food Crisis Reveals the Dangers of Environmental Planning

Monday, June 20, 2022

How America’s Recycling Program Failed—and Scarred the Environment

In March 2019, The New York Times ran a shocking story exploring why many prominent US cities were abandoning their recycling programs.

“Philadelphia is now burning about half of its 1.5 million residents’ recycling material in an incinerator that converts waste to energy,” Times business writer Michael Corkery reported. “In Memphis, the international airport still has recycling bins around the terminals, but every collected can, bottle and newspaper is sent to a landfill.”

Philadelphia and Memphis were not outliers. They, along with Deltona, Florida, which had suspended its recycling program the previous month, were just a few examples of hundreds of cities across the country that had scrapped recycling programs or scaled back operations.

Since that time, cities across the country have continued to scrap recycling programs, citing high costs.

By relying on government coercion, we ended up with a recycling system that made no sense—economically or environmentally.

“The cost of recycling was going to double, and the town wasn't going to be able to absorb that cost,” said Dencia Raish, the town clerk administrator for Akron, Colorado, which ended its program in 2021 and now sends “recyclables” to a landfill.

While many Americans likely are distraught about America’s failed recycling experiment, a new video produced by Kite & Key Media reveals that abandoning recycling—at least in its current form—is likely to benefit both Americans and the environment.

Like many problems in American history, recycling began as a moral panic.

The frenzy began in the spring of 1987 when a massive barge carrying more than 3,000 tons of garbage—the Mobro 4000—was turned away from a North Carolina port because rumor had it the barge was carrying toxic waste. (It wasn’t.)

“Thus began one of the biggest garbage sagas in modern history,” Vice News reported in a feature published a quarter-century later, “a picaresque journey of a small boat overflowing with stuff no one wanted, a flotilla of waste, a trashier version of the Flying Dutchman, that ghost ship doomed to never make port.”

The Mobro was simply seeking a landfill to dumb the garbage, but everywhere the barge went it was turned away. After North Carolina, the captain tried Louisiana. Nope. Then the Mobro tried Belize, then Mexico, then the Bahamas. No dice.

“The Mobro ended up spending six months at sea trying to find a place that would take its trash,” Kite & Key Media notes.

America became obsessed with the story. In 1987 there was no Netflix, smartphones, or Twitter, so apparently everyone just decided to watch this barge carrying tons of trash for entertainment. The Mobro became, in the words of Vice, “the most watched load of garbage in the memory of man.”

The Mobro also became perhaps the most consequential load of garbage in history.

Putting government in charge of recycling was a big mistake.

“The Mobro had two big and related effects,” Kite & Key Media explains. “First, the media reporting around it convinced Americans that we were running out of landfill space to dispose of our trash. Second, it convinced them the solution was recycling.”

Neither claim, however, was true.

The idea that the US was running out of landfill space is a myth. The urban legend likely stems from the consolidation of landfills in the 1980s, which saw many waste depots retired because they were small and inefficient, not because of a national shortage. In fact, researchers estimate that if you take just the land the US uses for grazing in the Great Plains region, and use one-tenth of one percent of it, you’d have enough space for America's garbage for the next thousand years. (This is not to say that regional problems do not exist, Slate points out..

Mandated recycling efforts, meanwhile, have proven fraught.

During moral panics, it’s not uncommon for lawmakers to get involved. Recycling was no exception.

Within just a handful of years of the Mobro panic, a recycling revolution spread across the continent. In a single year, more than 140 recycling laws were enacted in 38 states—in most cases mandating recycling and/or requiring citizens to pay for it. Within just a few years 6,000 curbside programs serving some 70 million Americans were created.

Some people saw problems early on in this approach.

“The fact is that sometimes recycling makes sense and sometimes it doesn’t. In the legislative rush to pass recycling mandates, state and local governments should pause to consider the science and the economics of every proposition,” economist Lawrence Reed wrote in 1995. “Often, bad ideas are worse than none at all and can produce lasting damage if they are enshrined in law. Simply demanding that something be recycled can be disruptive of markets and it does not guarantee that recycling that makes either economic or environmental sense will even occur.”

The reality is recycling is incredibly complicated—something Discover magazine pointed out more than a decade ago. While it makes sense to recycle some products, there’s also circumstances where recycling makes no sense at all.

Take plastic. For various reasons, plastic is not conducive to recycling. A Columbia University study published in 2010 found that a mere 16.5 percent of plastic collected by New York’s Department of Sanitation was actually “recyclable.” That might not sound like much, but it’s actually much higher than the percentage of plastic that is recycled globally, according to other studies.

Physics has a lot to do with this. In most cases, it’s less expensive to simply make new plastic than to recycle old plastic. But the costs of recycling are not just economic.

Proponents of recycling often acknowledge its economic costs. These costs can run high and recently got even higher (more on that later), but they say those costs are necessary to protect the environment.

The argument ignores, however, that recycling—especially recycling done badly—also comes with severe environmental costs. It doesn’t just take dollars to recycle plastic but also energy and water (think about how much water you spend rinsing your recyclables for a moment).

For plastic in particular, the environmental costs are even more staggering than the economic costs.

“The newest, high tech methods of recycling [plastic] generate carbon emission 55 times higher than just putting it into a landfill,” Kite & Key Media says.

But greenhouse gas emissions aren’t the only environmental cost. Did you ever wonder how we got a patch of plastic in the ocean that is twice the size of Texas?

The Great Pacific garbage patch is a mass of debris in the Pacific Ocean that weighs about 3 million tons. How it got there is not exactly a mystery. It’s a collection of trash that came from countries in Asia, South America, and North America that researchers believe has increased “10-fold each decade" since the conclusion of World War II.

Americans who’ve spent the last few decades recycling might think their hands are clean. Alas, they are not. As the Sierra Club noted in 2019, for decades Americans’ recycling bins have held “a dirty secret.”

“Half the plastic and much of the paper you put into it did not go to your local recycling center. Instead, it was stuffed onto giant container ships and sold to China,” journalist Edward Humes wrote. “There, the dirty bales of mixed paper and plastic were processed under the laxest of environmental controls. Much of it was simply dumped, washing down rivers to feed the crisis of ocean plastic pollution.”

If Americans are serious about recycling to create a better future for humans, they’d get government out of the recycling business

It’s almost too hard to believe. We paid China to take our recycled trash. China used some and dumped the rest. All that washing, rinsing, and packaging of recyclables Americans were doing for decades—and much of it was simply being thrown into the water instead of into the ground.

The gig was up in 2017 when China announced they were done taking the world’s garbage through its oddly-named program, Operation National Sword. This made recycling much more expensive, which is why hundreds of cities began to scrap and scale back operations.

China’s decision provoked anger in the United States, but in reality the decision was a first (and necessary) step toward improving the environment and coming to grips with a failed paradigm.

Americans meant well with their recycling efforts. We thought by recycling trash instead of burying it in a landfill, we were doing some good. Instead, tons of it (literally thousands and thousands of tons) was thrown into rivers and other waterways, contributing to the ocean plastic pollution problem.

How did this happen?

There are several answers to this question. NPR says Big Oil—always a convenient scapegoat—is to blame for letting people believe that recycling plastic made sense. But I think basic economics and moral philosophy are a better place to start.

There was a reason Larry Reed, who today is president emeritus of FEE, sniffed out the false promise of recycling nearly 30 years ago.

“Market economists—by nature, philosophy, and experience—are skeptical of schemes to supplant the free choices of consumers with the dictates of central planners,” Reed explained at the time.

The idea that mountains of refuse can just be turned into something of value with the right local mandates never smelled right, largely because we have centuries of evidence that show markets are smarter than government bureaucrats because markets use infinitely more knowledge.

The ends desired from recycling—a cleaner planet— were pure. The means we chose to pursue those ends—dictates of central planners—were not.

This might sound simple, but the Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman correctly observed it’s not.

“The hardest thing in the world to understand is that people operating separately, through their joint relations with one another, through market transactions, can achieve a greater degree of efficiency and of output than can a single central planner,” Friedman noted in a 2001 interview.

This is not to say recycling can never work. It can.

Items like cardboard, paper, and metals (think aluminum) account for as much as 90 percent of greenhouse gas reduction from recycling, research shows, and they also make the most sense economically, since they are less expensive to recycle and offer more value.

The problem isn’t recycling, but the means we use to recycle. The author Leonard Read, the founder of FEE, was fond of a Ralph Waldo Emerson poem that touched on ends and means.

“Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit, cannot be severed;” Emerson wrote, “for the effect already blooms in the cause, the end pre-exists in the means, the fruit in the seed.”

What Emerson and Read understood was that noble ends are not enough. If the means we use to achieve a desired result are rotten, the fruit itself is likely to be rotten as well.

The ends desired from recycling—a cleaner planet— were pure. The means we chose to pursue those ends—dictates of central planners—were not.

By relying on government coercion, we ended up with a recycling system that made no sense—economically or environmentally. And that’s why we ended up with tens of thousands of tons of recycled items dumped into the ocean. Putting government in charge of recycling was a big mistake.

If Americans are serious about recycling to create a better future for humans, they’d get government out of the recycling business and make way for entrepreneurs armed with local knowledge and the profit motive.

Instead of seeing recyclables dumped into our rivers and oceans, we’d see them creating value. That’s a win for humans and the planet.

Jon Miltimore
Jon Miltimore

Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune.

Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times. 

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

How America’s Recycling Program Failed—and Scarred the Environment

Tuesday, March 22, 2022

Al Gore’s 2009 Warning on Vanishing Polar Ice and the Perils of Censoring ‘Misinformation’

While speaking at a climate change summit in Denmark in 2009, former Vice President Al Gore made an alarming statement.

Citing research from Dr. Wieslaw Maslowski, a professor of oceanography at the Naval Postgraduate School in California, Mr. Gore said it was likely that the north polar ice caps would soon be completely melted.

"These figures are fresh,” Mr. Gore said. “Some of the models suggest to Dr. Maslowski that there is a 75 percent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years."

In his 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, Gore cited studies which said “in the next 50 to 70 years” the ice caps would be completely melted. What had caused the melting to suddenly increase by a factor of ten? Well, nothing. As NPR noted, Mr. Gore was misrepresenting the data of Maslowski.

"It's unclear to me how this figure was arrived at," Dr. Maslowski told The Times UK. "I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this."

Gore’s office soon issued a statement saying the 75 percent figure was a "ballpark figure" Dr. Maslowski had used in a casual conversation with Gore several years earlier.

Fortunately, both Gore and Maslowski were wrong.

In 2021, the Arctic sea ice extent was 4.72 million square kilometers, about 11 percent more than the 4.16 million kilometers in 2007, according to NASA’s estimates.*

As Reuters reported in a recent fact-check, Mr. Gore was guilty of misrepresenting scientific data—or “spreading “misinformation.”

In 2009, many responded playfully to Gore’s faux pas.

“Like most politicians, practicing and reformed, Al Gore has been known to stretch the truth on occasion,” NPR noted, adding that Gore had also claimed he’d helped create the internet.

Today, misinformation is treated in a much different way—at least in some instances. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, many writers and scientists who questioned the government’s use of lockdowns, mask mandates, enforced social distancing, and vaccine mandates were banned from social media platforms while others lost their jobs.

Earlier this month, San Francisco attorney Michael Senger was permanently banned from Twitter after calling the government’s pandemic response “a giant fraud.” In August, it was former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson who got the boot after questioning the efficacy of vaccines in preventing COVID-19 transmission. Months earlier it was author Naomi Wolf, a political advisor to the presidential campaigns of Bill Clinton and Al Gore.

Twitter is hardly alone, of course. Facebook and YouTube also announced policies banning the spread of COVID misinformation, particularly information related to vaccines, which is what got Drs. Peter McCullough and Robert Malone ostracized and banned.

Some may argue these policies are vital, since they protect readers from false information. However, there is nothing that says Big Tech can only ban information that is false. On the contrary, in court proceedings Twitter has claimed it has “the right to ban any user any time for any reason” and can discriminate “on the basis of religion, or gender, or sexual preference, or physical disability, or mental disability.”

Facebook, meanwhile, has argued in court that the army of fact-checkers they employ to protect readers from false information are merely sharing “opinions,” and are therefore exempt from defamation claims.

What Big Tech is doing is concerning, but the fact that this censorship is taking place in coordination with the federal government makes it doubly so.

In July, in arguably the most anti-free speech pronouncement made at the White House in modern history, White House press secretary Jen Psaki noted the White House is “flagging problematic posts for Facebook.”

“We are in regular touch with these social media platforms, and those engagements typically happen through members of our senior staff, but also members of our COVID-19 team,” Psaki explained.

All of this is being done in the name of science, but let’s be clear: there’s nothing scientific about censorship.

This week I’ll participate in an event at the Kirby Center in Washington, DC, hosted by the Academy for Science and Freedom. Led by leading scientists Scott Atlas, Jay Bhattacharya, and Martin Kulldorff, the event will explore the future of science in the face of widespread censorship, which has eroded faith in science.

To rebuild that trust we must remember that censorship is about power, not science, and recall the wisdom of one of history’s greatest scientists: Albert Einstein.

“[F]reedom of communication is indispensable for the development and extension of scientific knowledge … it must be guaranteed by law,” Einstein wrote in a 1940 essay on freedom and science. “But laws alone cannot secure freedom of expression; in order that every man may present his views without penalty there must be a spirit of tolerance in the entire population.”

That spirit of tolerance is missing today and must be restored. Scientists and public officials will make mistakes—just ask Al Gore—but purging ideas from the public square is a sign of a dogmatic society, not a scientific one.

*Correction: The Arctic sea ice extent was 4.72 million square kilometers in 2021—not kilometers. We regret the error.  

Jon Miltimore
Jon Miltimore

Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune.

Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times. 

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Al Gore’s 2009 Warning on Vanishing Polar Ice and the Perils of Censoring ‘Misinformation’

Monday, October 18, 2021

Why California’s Move to Ban Gas-Powered Generators (and Lawn Equipment) Could Leave Californians in the Dark

“Excuse me,” says your landscaper. “The mower’s out of juice. Mind if I plug in?” You look from the immobile machine to your half-cut lawn. “Outlet’s over there,” you tell him. “But let’s knock $20 off your fee? What are we up to now, 25 cents a kilowatt-hour?”

Welcome to the future. Welcome to California.

The state, committed to net-zero emissions by 2045, is moving to ban sales of gas-powered landscaping equipment as early as 2024. This is not the first attempt. Politicians tried and failed to do the same in 2003. Since then, though, more than half of homeowners in the state have swapped out their consumer-grade equipment for “zero emission equipment” (ZEE), meaning, battery-powered weed whackers, leaf blowers, hedge clippers, chainsaws, and even lawn mowers.

Many make the switch because, although lower-powered and less reliable (do batteries ever die at the right time?), battery-powered equipment is less noisy. That’s what prompted Mayor Stewart Welch of Mountain Brook, Alabama to begin switching his town’s tools over to electric. The bellow of leaf blowers disturbed his tennis game with a friend who, as chance would have it, had previously complained about the town’s noisy equipment. The city has spent $18,000 over the last year outfitting its public works crew with electric trimmers, blowers, and more.

According to Stanley Black & Decker, sales of the company’s electric yard equipment jumped 75 percent between 2015 and 2020. But, although lots of people are making the switch of their own accord, they’re not doing it fast enough, according to California’s legislative assembly.

The biggest holdouts are those who do landscaping for a living, and for good reason. I searched Husqavarna’s site high and low for battery run time info for its 550iBTX, which one landscaper reviewed as “The best electric blower on the market.” For $469? Not bad, I thought. After lots of web searching about the battery, I gave up and contacted support. Turns out, it does not come with one. The lowest-priced option will cost landscapers an extra $300 and lasts between thirty and sixty minutes. The one the associate recommended, though, costs $969 (yes, more than double the cost of the blower) and “lasts up to 3.5 hours,” he told me. That’s if you run it in “normal” mode, which is half the power of Husqavarna’s $459 gas blower; boost mode saps the power faster and is about 33 percent less powerful than the gas blower.

Some landscapers make electric work, and not just those whose equipment is paid for by taxpayers, as in Mountain Brook. Chris Regis, owner of Florida-based lawn care company Suntek, is able to charge customers between 10 and 20 percent more for all-electric lawn care. He says, “There are people who don’t care and say, ‘I just don’t want the noise.’” All power to them. That’s exactly how free markets work.

Given the numbers above, though, it would take a lot of lawns to make up one’s initial investment with only a 10 or 20 percent upcharge. But Regis’s investment is far greater. He has outfitted the company’s vans with solar panels for recharging batteries on the go—each van costing about $100,000. Reflecting on how much longer the same work now takes him, Jimi Layne of Mountain Brook’s crew asked, “Are we looking at dollars and cents?”

That’s an even more pertinent question in California, where energy prices are the highest in the continental US. (23.11 cents per kilowatt-hour, as of June 2021). Gas is more expensive there, too, in large part because of penalizing policies, but researchers predict electricity prices can only rise in the golden state, thanks to a host of factors. Prices are high, in part, because the size of the state increases transmission costs, as do wildfires on mismanaged public lands that have knocked out critical infrastructure, requiring replacement.

But the biggest contributor to high prices is the state’s push to adopt wind and solar, which require big upfront investments but nonetheless necessitate a reliable backup for when the sun’s not shining and the wind’s not blowing.

This problem came to the fore in 2020 when, for two days, California’s three big energy companies instituted rolling blackouts across the state because the grid could not meet demand. It was a self-inflicted wound. Given the state’s environmental restrictions, many coal-fired power plants are being decommissioned, and thanks to irrational fears, they’re not being replaced with clean, reliable nuclear energy, either.

Instead, taxpayers are being forced to subsidize massive investments in “renewables,” and power companies make up much of the state’s inevitable shortfalls by buying energy from more reliable, fossil-fuel plants in neighboring states. Unfortunately for Californians, on August 14, 2020, when the sun set and solar farms went offline, these companies realized they had miscalculated how big that shortfall would be. Western states were in the grip of a heat wave, and as Californians reached for the AC dials, they lost power altogether.

Losing power is no minor inconvenience, particularly when you live in what is naturally a desert, and especially when it’s more than 100 degrees outside. It’s not just that people can’t charge their Teslas or their ZEE mowers. One 2020 study concluded that more than 5,500 Americans lose their lives due to extreme heat annually. Climate-related deaths are a key indicator of low climate resilience, the ability of a locale to deal with extreme temperatures and weather. And, of course, climate resilience is directly dependent on plentiful, affordable, reliable energy.

But, increasingly, that is what California is doing away with in favor of expensive, unreliable energy. Unsurprisingly, the poor suffer the most. Research done in 2020 shows that many in Los Angeles can’t afford air conditioners, and many who have them can’t afford to run them because electricity prices are so high. In fact, accounting for cost of living, California has the highest poverty rate in the country, in large part because energy prices are so high. This, not in spite of the state’s adoption of “cheap” and “reliable” renewables, but because of it—because solar and wind are not cheap nor reliable and require a backup that is.

Yet, with startling shortsightedness, the state assembly has sent Governor Gavin Newsom a bill that will effectively eliminate a go-to backup: gas-powered generators. The bill (AB-1346) lumps gas-powered generators in with the offending landscaping equipment and all other “small off-road engines,” referring to them as SOREs. It “encourages” the California Air Resources Board (the state’s own sort of EPA) to “adopt cost-effective and technologically feasible regulations to prohibit engine exhaust and evaporative emissions from new small off-road engines” and to consider “expected availability of zero-emission generators.”

Such generators do exist, but they are far more expensive, generate far less power, and most need to be recharged after just a few hours. Consider the GOAL ZERO YETI 3000X. It costs $3,400, and an additional $250 kit enables you to use it as a battery backup for your home. After all that, you can power a single refrigerator for less than 2.5 days, and that of course drops if you want to power, say, a few lightbulbs. By contrast, a Duromax XP10000HX can power your whole home—lights, appliances, and A/C system—continuously, running on either gasoline or propane, and it costs $1,400.

When the power went out last August, says Collin Blackwell of Eldorado Hills, California, “We went out and bought an $800 generator, so that way we could have the fridge powered up in the garage at least and be able to have food and everything in the house.” Mark Galloway of Cameron Park said he lives in a mountain community where losing power is fairly common. “You should have something, so having the backup generator and things like that—I think it’s on you to really take care of that,” he said. “It’s not like it’s something that you can’t plan for.”

But, if AB-1346 is signed into law, going out and buying an $800 generator will no longer be an option. 

California legislators have not only cut ties with reality—failing to see that they’re heading for ever more blackouts—they also want to cut their citizens’ last lifeline to reliable power when these blackouts inevitably occur. California is committing energy suicide, and given that people rely on energy for just about everything, we shouldn’t be surprised by the toll this will take on human life.

Jon Hersey
Jon Hersey

Jon Hersey is managing editor of The Objective Standard, fellow and instructor at Objective Standard Institute, and Hazlitt fellow at Foundation for Economic Education.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

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