Paul Driessen
Back in 1970, when I got involved in the first Earth Day and
nascent environmental movement, we had real pollution problems. But over time,
new laws, regulations, attitudes and technologies cleaned up our air, water and
sloppy industry practices. By contrast, today’s battles are rarely about the environment.
As Ron Arnold and I detail in our new book, Cracking Big
Green: To save the world from the save-the-Earth money machine,
today’s eco-battles pit a $13.4-billion-per-year
U.S. environmentalist industry against the reliable, affordable, 82% fossil
fuel energy that makes our jobs, living standards, health, welfare and
environmental quality possible. A new Senate Minority Staff Report chronicles how today’s battles
pit poor, minority and blue-collar families against a far-left “Billionaires Club” and the radical environmentalist groups it
supports and directs, in collusion with federal,
state and local bureaucrats, politicians and judges – and with thousands of
corporate bosses and alarmist scientists who profit mightily from the
arrangements.
These ideological comrades in arms run masterful, well-funded,
highly coordinated campaigns that have targeted, not just coal, but all
hydrocarbon energy, as well as nuclear and even hydroelectric power. They fully
support the Obama agenda, largely because they helped create that agenda.
They seek ever-greater control over our lives, livelihoods, living
standards, liberties and wealth. They know they will rarely, if ever, be held
accountable for the fraudulent science they employ and the callous, careless,
even deliberate harm they inflict. They also know their own wealth and power will largely shield them from the
deprivations that their policies impose on the vast majority of Americans.
These Radical Greens have impacted coal mines, coal-fired power
plants, factories, the jobs that went with them, and the family security,
health and welfare that went with those jobs. They have largely eliminated
leasing, drilling, mining and timber harvesting across hundreds of millions of
acres in the western United States and Alaska – and are now targeting ranchers.
In an era of innovative seismic and drilling technologies, they have cut oil production by 6% and gas
production by 28% on federally controlled lands.
Meanwhile, thanks to a hydraulic fracturing revolution that
somehow flew in under the Radical Green radar, oil production on state and private lands has soared by
60% – from 5 million barrels per day in 2008 (the lowest ebb since 1943) to 8
million bpd in 2014. Natural gas output climbed even more rapidly. This
production reduced gas and gasoline prices, and created hundreds of thousands
of jobs in hundreds of industries and virtually every state. So now, of course,
Big Green is waging war on “fracking” (which the late Total Oil CEO Christophe
de Margerie jovially preferred to call “rock massage”).
As Marita Noon recently noted, Environment America has issued a
phony “Fracking by the Numbers” screed. It grossly misrepresents this
67-year-old technology and falsely claims the industry deliberately obscures
the alleged environmental, health and community impacts of fracking, by
limiting its definition to only the actual moment in the extraction process
when rock is fractured. For facts
about fracking, revisit a few of my previous articles: here, here and here
– and another new US Senate report.
Moreover, when it comes to renewable energy, Big Green studiously
ignores its own demands for full disclosure and obfuscates the impacts of
technologies it promotes. Wind power is a perfect example.
Far from being “free” and “eco-friendly,” wind-based electricity
is extremely unreliable and expensive, despite the mandates and subsidies
lavished on it. The cradle-to-grave ecological impacts are stunning.
The United States currently has over 40,000 turbines, up to 570 feet tall and 3.0 megawatts in
nameplate output. Unpredictable winds mean they generate electricity at 15-20%
of this “rated capacity.” The rest of the time mostly fossil fuel generators do
the work. That means we need 5 to 15
times more steel, concrete, copper and other raw materials, to build huge
wind facilities, transmission lines to far-off urban centers, and “backup”
generators – than if we simply built the backups near cities and forgot about
the turbines.
Every one of those materials requires mining, processing, shipping
– and fossil fuels. Every turbine, backup generator and transmission line
component requires manufacturing, shipping – and fossil fuels. The backups run
on fossil fuels, and because they must “ramp up” dozens of times a day, they
burn fuel very inefficiently, need far more fuel, and emit far more “greenhouse
gases,” than if we simply built the backups and forgot about the wind turbines.
The environmental impacts are enormous.
Environmentalists almost never mention any of this – or the
outrageous wildlife and human impacts.
Bald and golden eagles
and other raptors are attracted to wind turbines, by prey and the prospect of
using the towers for perches, nests and resting spots, Save the Eagles
International president Mark Duchamp noted in comments to the US Fish & Wildlife Service. As a
result, thousands of these magnificent flyers are slaughtered by turbines every
year. Indeed, he says, turbines are “the perfect ecological trap” for
attracting and killing eagles, especially as more and more are built in and
near important habitats.
Every
year, Duchamp says, they also butcher millions of other birds and millions of bats that are attracted to turbines by abundant
insects – or simply fail to see the turbine blades, whose tips travel at 170
mph.
Indeed, the death toll is orders of magnitude higher than the
“only” 440,000 per year admitted to by Big Wind companies and the USFWS. Using
careful carcass counts tallied for several European studies, I have estimated
that turbines actually kill at least 13,000,000 birds and bats per year in the USA
alone!
Wildlife consultant Jim Wiegand has written several articles that
document these horrendous impacts on raptors, the devious methods the wind industry uses
to hide the slaughter, and the many ways the FWS and Big Green
collude with Big Wind operators to exempt
wind turbines from endangered species, migratory bird and other laws that
are imposed with iron fists on oil, gas, timber and mining companies. The FWS
and other Interior Department agencies are using worries about sage grouse and
White Nose Bat Syndrome to block mining, drilling and fracking. But wind
turbines get a free pass, a license to kill.
Big Green, Big Wind and Big Government regulators likewise almost
never mention the human costs – the
sleep deprivation and other health impacts from infrasound noise and constant
light flickering effects associated with nearby turbines, as documented by Dr. Sarah Laurie and other
researchers.
In short, wind power may well be our least sustainable energy source – and the one least able
to replace fossil fuels or reduce carbon dioxide emissions that anti-energy
activists falsely blame for climate change (that they absurdly claim never happened prior
to the modern industrial age). But of course their rants have nothing to do
with climate change or environmental protection.
The climate change dangers exist only in computer models,
junk-science “studies” and press releases. But as the “People’s Climate March”
made clear, today’s watermelon environmentalists (green on the outside, red on
the inside) do not merely despise fossil fuels, fracking and the Keystone
pipeline. They also detest free enterprise capitalism, modern living standards,
private property … and even pro football!
They invent and inflate risks that have nothing to do with
reality, and dismiss the incredible benefits that fracking and fossil fuels
have brought to people worldwide. They go ballistic over alleged risks of using modern technologies, but are
silent about the clear risks of not using
those technologies. And when it comes to themselves, Big Green and the
Billionaires Club oppose and ignore the transparency, integrity, democracy and
accountability standards that they demand from everyone they attack.
The upcoming elections offer an opportunity to start changing this
arrogant, totalitarian system – and begin rolling back some of the radical
ideologies and agendas that have been too institutionalized in Congress, our
courts, Executive Branch and many state governments. May we seize the
opportunity.
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.
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