Paul Driessen and
Roger Bezdek
“Social
responsibility” activists want universities and pension funds to eliminate
fossil fuel companies from their investment portfolios. They plan to spotlight
their demands on “Global Divestment Day,” February 13-14. Their agenda is
misguided, immoral, lethal … even racist.
A mere 200 years
ago, the vast majority of humans were poor, sick and malnourished. Life
expectancy in 1810 was less than 40 years, and even royal families lived under
sanitation, disease and housing standards inferior to what poor American
families enjoy today. Then a veritable revolution occurred.
The world began to
enjoy a bonanza in wealth, technology, living standards and life spans. In just
two centuries, average world incomes rose eleven-fold, disease rates plummeted,
and life expectancy more than doubled. Unfortunately, not everyone benefitted
equally, and even today billions of people still live under conditions little
better than what prevailed in 1810. Bringing them from squalor, disease and
early death to modernity may be our most important economic, technological and
moral challenge.
Many factors played
vital roles in this phenomenal advancement. However, as Julian Simon, Indur Goklany, Alex Epstein and the authors of this article have documented, driving all this
progress were fossil fuels that provided the energy for improvements in
industry, transportation, housing, healthcare and environmental quality, and
for huge
declines in climate-related deaths due to storms, droughts, heat and cold. Modern civilization is undeniably high energy
– and 85% of the world’s energy today is still coal, oil and natural gas. These
fuels support $70 trillion per year in global gross domestic product, to power virtually
everything we make, grow, ship, drive, eat and do. The rest of the world
deserves nothing less.
Demands that
institutions eliminate hydrocarbon stocks, and society stop using fossil fuels,
would reverse this progress, jeopardize people’s health and living standards,
and prevent billions of still impoverished people worldwide from enjoying the
living standards that many of us take for granted.
Trains and
automobiles would not run. Planes would not fly. Refrigeration, indoor
plumbing, safe food and water, central heating and air conditioning, plastics
and pharmaceuticals would disappear or become luxuries for wealthy elites. We
would swelter in summer and freeze in winter. We’d have electricity only when
it’s available, not when we need it – to operate assembly lines, conduct
classes and research, perform life-saving surgeries, and use computers, smart
phones and social media.
Divesting fossil
fuels portfolios is also financially imprudent. Fossil-fuel stocks are among
the best for solid, risk-adjusted returns. One analysis found that a 2.1% share in fossil fuel companies
by colleges and universities generated 5.7% of all endowment gains in 2010 to
2011, to fund scholarship, building and other programs. Teacher, police and
other public pension funds have experienced similar results.
That may be why
such institutions often divest slowly, if at all, over 5-10 years, to maximize
their profits. One is reminded of St. Augustine of Hippo’s prayer: “Please let
me be chaste and celibate – but not yet.” The “ethical” institutions selling
fossil fuel stocks also need to find buyers who are willing to stand up to
divestment pressure group insults and harassment. They also need to deal with
hard realities.
No “scalable”
alternative fuels currently exist to replace fossil fuels. To avoid the
economic, social, environmental and human health catastrophes that would follow
the elimination of hydrocarbons, we would need affordable, reliable options on
a large enough scale to replace the fuels we rely on today. The divestment
movement ignores the enormity of current and future global energy needs (met
and unmet), and the fact that existing “renewable” technologies cannot possibly
meet those requirements.
Fossil fuels
produce far more energy per acre than biofuels, notes analyst Howard Hayden.
Using biomass – instead of coal or natural gas – to generate electricity for
one U.S. city of 700,000 people would require cutting down trees across an area
the size of Rhode Island every year. Making corn-based ethanol to replace the
gasoline in U.S. vehicles would require planting every single acre of Iowa,
Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, North and South Dakota and
Wisconsin in corn for fuel. Wind and solar currently provide just 3% of global
energy consumption, the U.S. Energy Information Administration reports;
by 2040, as the world’s population continues to grow, hydroelectric, wind,
solar, biomass and geothermal energy combined will still represent only 15% of
the total, the EIA predicts.
Not using fossil
fuels is tantamount to not using energy. It is economic suicide and
eco-manslaughter.
Over the past three
decades, fossil fuels enabled 1.3 billion people to escape debilitating energy
poverty – over 830 million thanks to coal alone – and China connected 99% of
its population to the grid and increased its steel production eight times over,
again mostly with coal. However, 1.3 billion people are still desperate for
electricity and modern living standards. In India alone, over 300 million
people (the population of the entire United States) remain deprived of
electricity.
In Sub-Saharan
Africa, some 615 million (100 million more than in the USA, Canada and Mexico
combined) still lack this life-saving technology, and 730 million (the
population of Europe) still cook and heat with wood, charcoal and animal dung.
Millions die every year from lung and intestinal diseases, due to breathing
smoke from open fires and not having the safe food and water that electricity
brings.
Ending this lethal
energy deprivation will require abundant, reliable, affordable energy on
unprecedented scales, and more than 80% of it will have to come from fossil
fuels. Coal now provides 40% of the world’s electricity, and much more than
that in some countries. That is unlikely to change anytime soon.
We cannot even
build wind and solar facilities without coal and petroleum: to mine, smelt,
manufacture and transport materials for turbines, panels and transmission lines
– and to build and operate backup power units that also require vast amounts of
land, cement, steel, copper, rare earth metals and other materials.
Coal-fired power
plants in China, India and other developing countries do emit large quantities
of sulfates, nitrous oxides, mercury and soot that can cause respiratory
problems and death. However, modern pollution control systems could – and
eventually will – eliminate most of that.
Divestment activists
try to counter these facts by claiming that climate science is settled and the
world faces a manmade global warming cataclysm. On that basis they demand that
colleges and universities forego any debate and rush to judgment on hydrocarbon
divestment. However, as we have pointed out here and elsewhere, the alleged “97% consensus” is a fiction,
no manmade climate crisis is looming, and there is abundant evidence of massive “pHraud” in all too much climate chaos “research.”
We therefore ask:
What right do divestment activists and climate change alarmists have to deny
Earth’s most destitute people access to electricity and motor fuels, jobs and
better lives? To tell people what level of economic development, health and
living standards they will be “permitted” to enjoy? To subject people to
policies that “safeguard” families from hypothetical, exaggerated, manufactured
and illusory climate change risks 50 to 100 years from now – by imposing
energy, economic and healthcare deprivation that will perpetuate disease and
could kill them tomorrow?
That is not
ethical. It is intolerant and totalitarian. It is arrogant, immoral, lethal and
racist.
To these activists,
we say: “You first. Divest yourselves first. Get fossil fuels out of your
lives. All of them. Go live in Sub-Saharan Africa just like the natives for a
few months, drinking their parasite-infested water, breathing their polluted
air, enduring their disease-ridden flies and mosquitoes – without benefit of
modern drugs or malaria preventatives... and walking 20 miles to a clinic when
you collapse with fever.
To colleges,
universities and pension funds, we suggest this: Ensure open, robust debate on
all these issues, before you vote on divestment. Allow no noisy disruption, walk-outs
or false claims of consensus. Compel divestment advocates to defend their
positions, factually and respectfully. Protect the rights and aspirations of
people everywhere to reliable, affordable electricity, better living standards
and improved health. And instead of “Global Divestment Day,” host and honor
“Hydrocarbon Appreciation Day.”
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. Dr. Roger Bezdek is an
internationally recognized energy analyst and president of Management
Information Services, Inc., in Washington, DC (www.MISI-net.com).
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