‘Outside the Green Box’: New book unmasks ‘sustainable development’ fallacies
By Robert Bradley Jr. — May 8, 2017
“Energy consumption is not a villain. Nations that consume the most energy per person discharge the lowest level of air and water pollutants per person. Low-cost energy provides economic growth and generates capital for pollution control.”
Editor note: Steve Goreham has written another primer of note. The author of Climatism!: Science, Common Sense, and the 21st Century’s Hottest Topic (2010) and The Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change (2012), Goreham has just published a fun, readable book with great political timing.
The audience for Outside the Green Box: Rethinking Sustainable Development is not only any classroom studying energy choices and related public policies. Goreham is targeting the green consultant. The back cover explains:
Your firm spends millions to be environmentally sustainable. Carbon credits, renewable energy, ethanol fuel, and electric vehicles demonstate your company’s commitment. Fluorescent light bulbs, organic foods, and a hybrid car may be part of your personal commitement. But contrary to what your green consultant tells you, these and other sustainable measures provide little positive benefit to Earth’s environment.
But more so. When it comes to energy, the eco-benefits of renewables are illusory and have distinctive environmental costs.
MasterResource is pleased to publish an excerpt from the concluding chapter of Outside the Green Box, available from Amazon or at stevegoreham.com.
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Much of government policy, academic thought, and public opinion stands on fears created and promulgated by environmental sustainable development. The philosophy that humans are too many, too polluting, climate destroying, and profligate wasters of natural resources holds today’s society in a powerful psychological grip. Thousands of energy and environmental laws are justified on these misconceptions. Let’s briefly review why these ideas are incorrect.
Why India and Pakistan Are Renewing Their Love Affair with Coal
One nation is shirking emissions targets and the other is investing in more coal plants—but with America as a role model, that’s hardly surprising.
Much of the world agrees: burning coal is bad, and we ought to do less of it.
But not everyone sings from that sheet, including Pakistan’s Water and Power Ministry. As part of a large infrastructure investment project with China, it’s committed to spending $15 billion on as many as 12 new coal power plants over the next 15 years. Reuters reports that the figure is almost half of the $33 billion being invested into energy projects as part of the initiative, and that around 75 percent of the extra generation capacity will come from new coal plants.
The government insists that the new plants will use technology to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions. But the nation’s minister for planning, development and reform, Ahsan Iqbal, sounds downright Trumpian in his view of the nation’s future energy policy: “Pakistan must tap [its] vast underground reserves of 175 billion tonnes of coal, adequate to meet the country’s energy needs for several decades, for powering the country’s economic wheel, creating new jobs, and fighting spiking unemployment and poverty.”
Meanwhile, the Financial Times reports (paywall) that India will fail to meet its own targets to reduce emissions from its coal power plants. India’s struggle to clean up its energy act is well-known. But it’s currently unable to meet its own power demands, so it’s not really that practical to shut down plants—and given that no penalties will be imposed for failing to reduce emissions, there’s little incentive to do so.
To anyone who would criticize the move, Piyush Goyal, India’s power minister, had this to say: “India is not a polluter,” he told the Financial Times. “It’s America and the western world that has to first stop polluting.” There’s a grain of truth to that: America and Europe did a lot of coal burning during their development, and now have strong economies to leverage in order to clean up their acts. Developing countries aren’t so lucky. And developed countries still emit far more greenhouse gases per citizen than India and Pakistan. As of 2013 the annual per capita CO2 emissions of India and Pakistan were 1.59 and 0.85 metric tons respectively. In the U.S., the figure is 16.39 metric tons.
The
African Nations Plan More Than 100 New Coal Power Plants
More than 100 coal power plants are in various stages of planning or development in 11 African countries outside of South Africa — more than eight times the region’s existing coal capacity. Africa’s embrace of coal is in part the result of its acute shortage of power.
Source: African Nations Plan More Than 100 New Coal Power Plants…
Live Poor & ‘Green!’: World’s ‘Greenest’ People Live In Ridiculously Poor Authoritarian Regimes
By ANDREW FOLLETT – Daily Caller
A new report ranking countries with “the most environmentally friendly people” shows the greenest nations are also some of the poorest in the world.
A MoneySuperMarket report listed Mozambique, Ethiopia and Zimbabwe as having “the most environmentally friendly people in the world,” while ranking Americans as being some of the least eco-friendly people on the planet. That may not be a bad thing, though, given the greenest countries also tend to be poor and run by authoritarian regimes.
“At the top of the list, people from Mozambique have the least impact of anyone anywhere – using almost 100 per cent green energy, producing almost no carbon dioxide and creating almost no waste,” MoneySuperMarket said in a statement. “Their only disadvantage is that they don’t treat any of their wastewater, so anything that gets poured away stays as it is.”
The average person living in Mozambique earned $511.47 a year in 2015, which was 4 percent of the global average. Mozambique is ruled by an authoritarian-leaning “hybrid regime,” according to the Economist’s Democracy Index.
Likewise, the Economist lists Ethiopia’s government as an authoritarian regime, and Zambia is listed as having a “hybrid regime.” Ethiopia’s average resident earned $1,529.89 a year in 2015, and the average Zambian earned only $3,602.33. In contrast, the average American earned nearly $52,000 a year.
(Graphic: Courtesy of MoneySuperMarket)
In fact, there is not a single “full democracy” listed in the top 10 of MoneySuperMarket’s report. Three countries are listed as “flawed democracies,” four as “hybrid regimes” and three as authoritarian states.
The average person living in on of those 10 countries had an annual income of $3,640.83 in the year 2015 – nearly five times below the global average annual income of $17,760 in that year.
(Graphic: Courtesy of MoneySuperMarket)
The 10 least green countries listed in MoneySuperMarket’s report were far richer and more democratic than the greenest countries. Four of the 10 countries had “full democracy,” five were listed as “flawed democracies” and only China was listed as authoritarian.…
Trump Begins To Deconstruct Corrupt EPA-Owned ENERGY STAR Scam
Last year our US Attorney General was threatening to file criminal racketeering charges against private citizens for mockery of state science. Last week the new administration announced the repeal of the ENERGY STAR mandate, essentially shutting down the EPA’s Department of Junk Science. Elections have consequences!
President Trump has officially begun the deconstruction of the ENERGY STAR program, ending one of the most corrupt federal programs in US history. Repealing the ENERGY STAR mandate represents one of the most significant government reforms in decades, and a huge boost for science, education and commerce.
The EPA owns the ENERGY STAR brand, which is allegedly producing multi-billion dollar revenues in Global markets from ‘certified’ energy-efficiency. Just don’t ask to see the evidence, or the government might throw you in jail. And I mean that literally!
Thankfully President Trump just took Draining The Swamp to a whole new level. The repeal of the ENERGY STAR mandate is historic, which is why mainstream media must be in a complete state of panic. The ENERGY STAR mandate served as a Pay To Play toll-booth for all government contracting and services for decades. In terms of economic opportunity for the small business community in America, this is totally off the chart.
ENERGY STAR is arguably the most corrupt federal program in US history, a true National Disgrace which has inflicted more damage on America’s economy, scientific, educational and legal systems than an entire army of Bernie Madoff’s and John Beale’s.
Built entirely on myth, fraudulent scientific research and bogus technical reports promoted by the media, this secretive program has been mired in scandal and controversy since day one.
ENERGY STAR’s big break came rather suddenly in 2009, when EPA began boasting that their products save 25-50% more electrical energy than other identical products. Apparently EPA scientist were somehow able to infuse a ‘Social Justice’ component onto the electrons flowing in ENERGY STAR’s certified products that don’t exist in the rest of the universe. Or so it seems. No technological breakthroughs were involved in this miracle, only the reshuffling of words on paper were required to create this rare commodity.
Earth Hour: Hey, Let’s Live Like We’re In Venezuela
COMMENTARY
Earth Hour: Hey, Let’s Live Like We’re In Venezuela
Caracas, Venezuela: A mother with her children are walking past a man searching for food in waste in the street of Caracas. Every hour is “Earth Hour” in Caracas and other socialist “paradises.”(Polaris/Newscom)
Has there ever been in the history of man an event that offered more opportunities for virtue signaling than Earth Hour?
While North Koreans and Venezuelans and Cubans are literally dying for some First World amenities, the rich and ignorant in the developed world turned their lights off for an hour Saturday night to show … what?
Their solidarity with those living under regimes that have ground their economies into hopeless ruins?
Their concern over power bills that have become too expensive due to government-forced use of renewable energy sources?
Their disapproval of socialist systems that have wrecked the modern amenities the people once enjoyed?
No, they turned their lights off to demonstrate that they are morally superior — that unlike those who didn’t participate, they care about the environment.
Clear and independent thinkers had this con figured out years ago. Economist Donald Boudreaux called it, quite accurately, a mindless stunt.
EnvironMENTAL: Support group provides ‘a safe space for confronting climate grief’ – ‘The Problem With Climate Catastrophizing’
Via: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2017-03-21/problem-climate-catastrophizing
The Problem With Climate Catastrophizing – The Case for Calm
Do you feel emotionally overwhelmed, at least occasionally, because of news about climate change? Why/why not?
For just such feelings, a Salt Lake City support group provides “a safe space for confronting” what it calls “climate grief.”
Panicked thoughts often turn to the next generation. “Does Climate Change Make It Immoral to Have Kids?” pondered columnist Dave Bry in The Guardian in 2016. “[I] think about my son,” he wrote, “growing up in a gray, dying world—walking towards Kansas on potholed highways.” Over the summer, National Public Radio tackled the same topic in “Should We Be Having Kids In The Age Of Climate Change?” an interview with Travis Rieder, a philosopher at Johns Hopkins University, who offers “a provocative thought: Maybe we should protect our kids by not having them.” And Holthaus himself once responded to a worrying scientific report by announcing that he would never fly again and might also get a vasectomy.
Such attitudes have not evolved in isolation. They are the most intense manifestations of the same mindset that produces regular headlines about “saving the planet” and a level of obsession with reducing carbon footprints that is otherwise reserved for reducing waistlines. Former U.S. President Barack Obama finds climate change “terrifying” and considers it “a potential existential threat.” He declared in his 2015 State of the Union address that “no challenge—no challenge—poses a greater threat to future generations.” In another speech offering “a glimpse of our children’s fate,” he described “Submerged countries. Abandoned cities. Fields that no longer grow. Political disruptions that trigger new conflict, and even more floods
Potsdam PIK Climate Director Says We Will Have To Go Back To Mud Huts By 2040
Germany’s Deutsche Welle (DW) here presents a commentary by Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, the director of German ultra-alarmist Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. Professor Schellnhuber fears that the planet could warm even as much as 12°C if man does not act quickly to totally eliminate greenhouse gases.
Source: Potsdam PIK Climate Director Says We Will Have To Go Back To Mud Huts By 2040…
Fmr. UN climate chief Christina Figueres to Vatican – ‘We need to be clear that Fossil Fuels Kill’
The tagline for the Jan. 27 conference — titled “Laudato Si’ & Catholic Investing: Clean Energy for our Common Home” — came by way of the October 2015 statement issued by the heads of Catholic continental bishops’ conferences ahead of the COP 21 international climate change summit in Paris: “Put an end to the fossil fuel era, phasing out fossil fuel emissions and providing affordable, reliable and safe renewable energy access for all.”
Among the leaders who spoke were Cardinal Peter Turkson, head of the Vatican’s new dicastery for the Promotion of Integral Human Development, and Christina Figueres, the former executive secretary for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, along with:
- Mark Campanale, founder of the Carbon Tracker Initiative;
- Franciscan Sr. Sheila Kinsey, executive co-secretary for justice, peace and integrity of creation commission of the International Union of Superiors General;
- Lutheran Rev. Henrik Grape of Sweden from the World Council of Churches;
- Papua New Guinea Cardinal John Ribat, president of the Federation of Catholic Bishops’ Conferences of Oceania.
The experience of attending as a participant left me feeling surprised to see how far we have come in a few years, in our understanding and willingness to speak to the grave urgency of the climate crisis. Figueres was definitive on the need to ween the world off fossil fuels in the next few years. Though not often seen first as a Catholic, her call to metanoia was the sharpest and clearest of any of the speakers.
“This is a moral responsibility that we all share,” she said. “That moral responsibility, how are we going to ensure that it is achieved before it is too late for the most vulnerable? We need to align our moral compass … we need to be clear that fossil fuels kill.”
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Other speakers were also compelling with their words.
Cardinal Ribat said those on Pacific islands are facing rising seas on all sides. They are helpless in the face of this challenge, so even while
We’re All Living Longer, Despite What The ‘Experts’ Say!
By Paul Homewood If we were to believe the experts who warn us about all the things we are dying from, we would probably all be dead three times over! Whether it’s air pollution, alcohol, obesity, diabetes, smoking, NHS funding, climate change, and goodness knows what else, the warnings are invariably dire.
Source: We’re All Living Longer, Despite What The Experts Say!…