Spain’s Impossible Dream of ‘Green’ Electricity

By Paul Driessen

Updated Man of La Mancha lyrics could read: “To dream the impossible dream of clean, green, net-zero electricity, to fight the unbeatable foe of manmade climate cataclysms, we must run where the brave dare not go.”

Don Quixote saw windmills as malevolent and dangerous dragons. Spain’s governing classes view them from the Chinese perspective: benevolent and magical dragons.

They’ve erected over 22,000 gigantic windmills, to harness the wind and generate electricity. Portugal has nearly 3,000. Together, when conditions are perfect, they can generate almost 38 gigawatts.

Like Cervantes’ hero, the elites also want “to reach the unreachable star” – or at least capture the energy from one star: the sun. Spain and Portugal together also have 38 GW of photovoltaic solar panels.

However, the Iberian Peninsula neighbors have long ignored the dark sides of the forces they seek to commandeer. 

Those wind turbines, solar panels and transmission lines sprawl across some 2,000,000 acres of Spanish and Portuguese vistas, habitats and croplands. That’s equal to Delaware and Rhode Island combined.

They kill eagles, bustards, vultures, and other raptors and birds. Building them requires mining, pollution and child labor on historically unprecedented scales. Solar panels are easily destroyed by storms.

Worst, they provide intermittent, weather-dependent electricity – necessitating expensive backup power and making the electrical grid unstable. Just how unstable was demonstrated recently, and dramatically.  

On April 16, for the first time, for a few hours, Spain generated 100% of its electricity with wind, solar and hydro power.

A fortnight later, on April 28, a prolonged blackout sent Iberia into chaos. Lights, televisions, refrigerators, cell phones and traffic lights went dark. Trains, subways and elevators trapped passengers. Airports canceled flights. Hospital backup power provided only basic and emergency services.

The outage even struck parts of France and Belgium. It was Europe’s biggest blackout ever. If France hadn’t shut off its connection to Spain’s cascading problems, all of Europe could have shut down.

Just a week later, another blackout hit Spain’s Canary Islands.

Power outages are nothing new. But the Spain-Portugal blackouts underscore fundamental problems with the supposedly “inevitable transition” from coal, oil, natural gas and nuclear electricity to wind, solar and battery power.

They show that the only inevitability will be more frequent and severe blackouts – because of our soaring reliance on electricity … political decisions to mothball or destroy reliable generating systems … and ideological commitments to “green” energy.

We’re effectively being told: You’ll have electricity when it’s available – not necessarily when you need it. In this modern technological era, that is absurd, outrageous, intolerable and dangerous.

One fundamental reality must override all other considerations: Modern industrialized societies require enormous quantities of steady, synchronous alternating current, 24/7 – at the precise frequency of 50 Hertz in Europe and 60 Hz in the United States. Without it, life shuts down, societies descend into chaos, and people die.

Frequencies outside 0.2 Hz above or below that frequency can trigger major emergencies. A mere ±0.5 Hz deviation can cause system-wide cascading blackouts.

In Spain’s case, with 80% of its power now coming from renewable sources, the country simply did not have enough reliable, dispatchable, instantly accessible power on hand to keep its grid from collapsing when a power generation glitch happened.

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Rice University’s Baker Institute explained how a malfunction at two Spanish solar power plants triggered the widespread chaos.

“At approximately 12:30 pm local time in Spain – just minutes before the grid collapsed – renewable sources accounted for 78% of electricity generation in the Iberian system, with solar alone contributing nearly 60%. By contrast, conventional technologies, such as gas-fired and nuclear power plants, comprised only around 15% of the total generation mix….

“[Then] two consecutive generation loss events occurred in southwestern Spain, likely involving large solar installations…. Given the limited availability of conventional generation, these unexpected losses, combined with reduced support from neighboring systems – the instability triggered a disconnection from the French system – created a “perfect storm” for a massive power outage.

“In just five seconds, Spain lost approximately 15 GW of capacity, equivalent to 60% of its national electricity demand. The remaining generation was insufficient to meet demand, thus triggering a cascading failure across the entire grid. Various generating units were automatically disconnected to protect infrastructure, and nuclear plants were shut down in accordance with safety protocols.”

That’s all it took. In the blink of an eye, the Iberian Peninsula and beyond had a massive blackout.

Unless America’s Net Zero politicians and utility companies wake up to reality, multiple US states – indeed entire regions – face similar preventable (almost inevitable) disasters. The same nightmarish realities confront other countries worldwide.

First, because federal, state and local governments have pressured or ordered utility companies to shut down coal, gas, nuclear and even hydro power plants that still have years or decades of operational life. Other utilities have done so voluntarily, to showcase their climate and green energy bona fides.

Second, because the same governments also provide subsidies, loan guarantees, tax breaks, rapid permitting, and exemptions from endangered species and other environmental rules – to incentivize utilities to build more and more wind, solar and battery installations, instead of traditional power plants.

Third, because those same entities demand and often subsidize a steady conversion to electricity from gasoline and natural gas. Vehicles, home and apartment building heating systems, stoves and ovens, water heaters, lawn mowers, leaf blowers and more must be powered by electricity – to save the planet from manmade climate change – even as electricity generation and reliability dwindle.

This shortsighted, ideological, virtue-signaling government intrusion into what should be market-driven, reality-based, reliable-electricity-focused decisions puts our grid, our society and our lives at risk.

Abundant, reliable, affordable electricity is the lifeblood of twenty-first century civilization. Modern industrialized societies simply cannot function, or even survive, if they are forced to rely on land-hungry, expensive, insufficient, intermittent electricity.

And yet, largely because of misplaced climate fears, $9 trillion has been spent globally over the past decade on wind and solar power, electric vehicles, energy storage, electrified heating and power grid adjustments. 

Congress, state governors and legislatures, the Trump administration, our courts and utility companies need to act quickly and decisively to end this wasteful spending and fix our fragile electricity generating system and grid. The news media and academia must stop parroting “climate crisis” and “renewable energy” talking points, and start presenting the complexities and realities of these issues.

Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, climate change, environmental protection and human rights.

If It's Green, It's Not Gold

By Rich Kozlovich

Editor's Note:  I originally published this in 2013, and twelve years have passed and until now, nothing changed.  All these green initiatives whether they involve agriculture, energy production, or anything else, have been an economic and social disasters.  I published a follow up article, If It's Green, It's Not Gold!, in 2023.  I think it worthwhile to republish this 2013 article in order to establish just how disastrous going green really is, and why things need to change.  Please not the Tags at the end.  RK

In years gone by you would hear about some girl that had been given a ring that looked like gold but left a green residue on the finger. Well, there were a couple of things that were clear to everyone. The ring wasn’t gold and the guy who gave it to her was a cheap phony. Those promoting green initiatives in power generation, automotive enterprises and who knows how many other things, fall into that category, but unfortunately, they aren’t cheap. They are sticking the taxpayers with debts to the tune of billions of dollars of so-called green investments. Those investments are going down the rat hole and there is no end in sight.

I subscribe to the e-newsletter from the Environment and Climate news and received their latest edition for March yesterday listing some economically green disasters for which the American taxpayer is on the hook. As you read this you begin to wonder what is wrong with the minds of those who promote this stuff? It certainly can’t be ignorance because we have historical foundation to show that all these ‘green’ initiatives are economically disastrous. 

They were failures when promoted by Jimmy Carter, and they're still economically disastrous today. The only difference is that Carter could be excused for promoting these ‘alternative’ schemes because no one really knew if these were good ideas or not, and society had been prepped by circumstances for such an effort at that time.

He at least could claim ignorance, and in this case a valid argument. Every scientific success starts with ignorance which is dispelled through the trial and error processes of experimentation. But now we knew the outcome even before they started. We were of course being led to believe that the technology was “new and improved”, which has always been a great sales slogan, and a great punch line by comedians who parody con artists in some skit, or movie script.

Although I have no doubt that there were improvements, those improvements were in no way so advanced as to make ‘going green’, especially involving energy production, an economic success, and they had to know it. In short, it is impossible to believe that this wasn’t a deliberate effort to fraudulently promote this to the American taxpayer, who is now on a “green hook”.

Ideology and financial gain can cause intelligent people to fall for really dumb ideas, but this is inexcusable. I use this quote from Viv Forbes dealing with every green issue:

“The public has been misled by an unholy alliance of environmental scaremongers, funds-seeking academics, sensation-seeking media, vote-seeking politicians and profit-seeking vested interests.”

Please don’t tell me they were now ignorant. They are driven by greed, ideology or both and someone ought to be prosecuted, starting with the politicos who signed these agreements.

In an article entitled, Delaware Taxpayers on the ‘Green’ Hook as Fisker Can’t Pay Bills by Alyssa Carducci, she notes that “Delaware taxpayers may lose a $21.5 million “investment" as Fisker Automotive took taxpayer money to create green jobs but has yet to produce a single car in the state.” 

(Editor's Note:  The links in this article no longer work.  So you will just have to take my word for what appears here...or not... as you please. RK)

She goes on to say that the state will have to cover $400,000 in electric bills. So how did this come about? She says that:

In 2009 Gov. Jack Markell announced California-based Fisker Automotive Inc. would be setting up shop in the state after he offered the company $21.5 million in incentives. Delaware residents were promised 2,500 green jobs in return for their investment. And the results have been a complete failure to the point that even the “U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) suspended a $529 million federal loan to Fisker.” 

 And it gets worse as she notes that:

“Two months later, Fisker halted operations and laid off workers at a former General Motors site it had taken over in Delaware.”

My questions have always been thus:

1. How do they come up with these figures on how many jobs are going to be created with these initiatives?
2. It runs the gamut of a few hundred to five million. 
3. What formula are they using? 
4. Where did they get their insights? 
5. And if they are that smart, why are they wasting their time in government?

In reality these people don’t have a clue, and they're wasting their time in government because they'd fail as investment councilors, and this way they can be stunningly wrong, and still get paid.  

People who pick and choose companies to invest in for a living have difficulty, failing regularly. Why would we think a politician or a government bureaucrat would do any better? As my friend David Hansen, who at the time was President of the Buckeye Institute, asked an audience to name one politician or bureaucrat who picked Microsoft as a winner. No one put up their hand and for good reason. There isn’t one.

James M. Taylor, managing editor of Environment and Climate News reported that “Florida Rep. Gaetz Seeks End to State’s Ethanol Mandates”, saying:

“Florida State Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fort Walton Beach) will introduce legislation this year to repeal a state law requiring Florida service stations to sell only ethanol-blended gasoline. Energy experts say ethanol requirements raise transportation fuel costs, hike food prices, decrease gasoline mileage, and harm the environment in many ways.”

Even those who were going to stand against repealing this state law realized that “ ethanol production in Florida is not viable”. All these ‘Feel-Good’ Mandates have consequences, and one of those consequences is that “according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, ethanol subsidies and mandates have caused a dramatic rise in U.S. food prices since 2005, reversing 50 years of declining.” Are we to believe no one could see this was going to happen? This should have been obvious to the most casual observer.

Promises that never materialize are perfectly exemplified in the ‘experimental’ wind turbines that were placed (less than two years ago) on roof of the Michael V. DiSalle Government Center in Toledo, Ohio. They have now failed and all the expense for that fell on the backs of the taxpayers.

The promise by renewable energy advocates was that this scheme would save taxpayers thousands of dollars “each year” due to the reduction in their electricity bills. It didn’t! “The turbines ceased to spin and generate energy in March 2012. Beth Gianforcaro, state Development Services Agency (DSA) spokeswoman, reported the government agency deactivated the turbines due to maintenance and performance issues.”

Oh…yes….as always it gets worse. Helix Wind Corp., the manufacturer and installer of these turbines went broke and is out of business. So even if the state wanted to continue on with this scam they have no idea whether they can be fixed or who could do it.

This stuff is no different than any scam by any con artist that promises untold and unearned dollars for nothing. What disturbs me the most about this particular scam is that it occurred in Ohio. We don’t usually see things so stupidly, except happened in Toledo, and that explains it. 

Let’s face it, ‘going green’ is a bad investment, otherwise the world would have already ‘gone green’ from investments from the private sector and wouldn’t have had to be subsidized by governments all over the world.

Bad green investments that end up down the rat hole are one thing, but there are other even more onerous consequences to ‘going green’. Food prices are dramatically rising all over the world as a result of ethanol subsidies and mandates. After fifty years of falling prices that trend has reversed, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The so-called Arab Spring is believed to have been triggered by the rising cost of food caused by these ‘green’ mandates, and if that is the case this will only get worse worldwide.

The common theme from the green movement is that all of the things they promote; from the elimination of pesticides, an abandonment of production of energy by traditional sources and means, the elimination of dams so that the rivers may flow free, taking over millions of acres of other people’s property in order to save some beetle, or mouse, or a flower which may be listed as an endangered species; is for humanities own good.

The reality is that the writings from the foundational thinkers of the green movement show they were misanthropic, blaming mankind for all sorts of calamities that had no basis in fact, much like the claims by Rachel Carson in her science fiction book that ended up causing the ban on DDT, Silent Spring.

And if that is doubted intellectually, we must at the very least, acknowledge that in the real world none of their schemes generate the utopia they say they desire. In reality there are two things we can glean from history; dystopia follows the green movement like Sancho Panza followed Don Quixote de Le Mancha, a mad man.

If its green isn't gold!  It's corrupt, it's insane, it's irrational, it's misanthrope, and it's morally defective.   

Tags:  

2. Fraud is Still a Crime, Including Green Fraud!
3. If Green Prediction Was a Corporation, They'd Have a Monopoly on Being Wrong!
4.  To Be Green is to Be Irrational, Misanthropic, and Morally Defective, Part II 
5. Wind power makers suffer huge losses, want to abandon major project 
6. Oh No! Say it Ain't So!
7. Green is a Perfectly Nice Color

The Energy Transition Ain't Happening: "Clean Fuels"

August 19, 2024/ Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian 

Come here for the latest news on how the so-called “energy transition” is grinding to a halt. No amount of government handouts can make this ridiculously uneconomic fantasy work. My last post on the subject, on July 20, reported on the collapse of a large “green hydrogen” project in Australia, with the stated loss of an investment of about $2 billion (Australian) (equivalent to about $1.3 billion U.S.).

It seems that that one was just the tip of the iceberg. Today’s Wall Street Journal has a substantial roundup of the financial status of a half-dozen or so so-called “clean fuel” projects. The headlines from the print and online versions tell you what you need to know. In the print edition (page B3) it’s “Clean-Fuel Startups Begin to Fizzle Out.” Online, it’s “Clean Fuel Startups Were Supposed to Be the Next Big Thing. Now They Are Collapsing.” As the headlines indicate, pretty much all of these “clean fuels” ventures are failing. Who could have guessed?

The Journal’s label of “clean fuels” is used to cover two different categories, one being biofuels, and the other being so-called “green hydrogen” (the stuff produced by electrolysis of water using electricity produced by wind or sun). The biofuels category appears to include such genius ideas as making fuel for airplanes or ships out of used cooking grease. Whatever you might think of that idea, these are still carbon-based fuels, and it’s not clear to me at all why they are supposedly “cleaner” than other carbon-based fuels like petroleum or natural gas.

Hydrogen, on the other hand, offers the promise of providing energy for planes, trains, ships and automobiles free of the dreaded “carbon emissions.” Just hook up some solar panels or wind turbines to big electrolyzers and watch the stuff bubble out of the water virtually for free! The badly misnamed “Inflation Reduction Act” made billions upon billions of dollars of subsidies available for these kinds of projects. Surely the successes should be rolling forth one after the other by this time.

It turns out that no matter how many subsidies the government doles out, nobody can make this “green” hydrogen stuff as cheaply as natural gas can be produced by drilling into rock.

One of the big green hydrogen startups is called Plug Power. The Journal quotes its CEO, Andy Marsh:

“The excitement of the early days has not lived up to the hype,” said Andy Marsh, chief executive of Plug Power, a startup that recently opened one of the country’s first plants making green hydrogen, a potential replacement for fossil fuels in industries such as steel making and chemical production. Shares of Plug Power have tumbled more than 90% since the passage of the U.S. climate law two years ago.

Well, at least they’re not bankrupt — yet. You do have to wonder how Mr. Marsh could qualify to be a CEO of such a company and raise hundreds of millions of investor dollars without ever crunching the numbers to realize that green hydrogen could never be economical. Could it be that his business plan all along was to pay himself a big salary out of the investors’ funds and then walk away when the inevitable bankruptcy came?

Here are a couple of paragraphs from the Journal summarizing the overall state of the industry:

Many clean-fuel projects have become money pits, in part because of the great amounts of power they need. High interest rates, supply-chain disruptions and expensive power-grid upgrades have driven up electricity prices. . . . “The only way to fix it is by lowering the cost of green electricity,” said Andrew Forrest, one of the most vocal advocates of hydrogen.

Wait a minute. Andrew Forrest — where have we heard that name? Oh, he is the Australian tycoon who goes by the name “Twiggy.” He’s the head of the company Fortescue, and was the subject of my July 20 post as a result of the collapse of his big Australian green hydrogen project. The Journal goes on to some detail about “Twiggy’s” ongoing green hydrogen plans:

Forrest, the billionaire founder of Australian iron-ore giant Fortescue, said his company’s 2030 hydrogen production target now looks unrealistic. Fortescue is planning to produce its own clean power to make hydrogen in Australia and is considering doing the same in Arizona.

But somehow the Journal fails to mention the failure of Forrest’s big Australian project. Could it be that they interviewed him a month ago, before that happened?

So the odds are that nobody will ever be able to make these “clean fuels” economically. The consequence:

Without clean fuels, emissions at many companies are expected to keep climbing, threatening U.S. and global climate targets. Industries including aviation and shipping are counting on the new fuels because wind and solar power and batteries can’t meet their huge energy needs.

When are we allowed to declare that this whole charade is over?

UPDATE, August 20: Commenter Pablo Honey suggests that it might be interesting to look at the financials for one of these “clean fuels” companies. Here is the 2Q 24 earnings release for Plug Power, just out on August 8. Some key figures: revenue — $143.4 million; “earnings” — net loss of $262.3 million.

Margins: “The Georgia plant's increased production capacity and strategic price increases across the hydrogen product portfolio have significantly improved hydrogen margins.” So they are increasing prices from levels that were already a multiple of the price of natural gas for equivalent energy content. Good for them if they can get someone to pay, but that inherently means that their market is limited to buyers who either need hydrogen for its non-energy properties (i.e., fertilizer) or ones who are willing to forego profit out of religious devotion to “decarbonization.”

Government handouts:  

“Plug Power became one of the first companies to leverage the PTC [Production Tax Credit] for its liquid hydrogen plant in Georgia, optimizing financial performance and enhancing shareholder value. . . . Plug Power is progressing with the DOE loan, which aims to support the expansion of its green hydrogen initiatives and infrastructure for up to six sites.” Great — it’s another Solyndra in the works.

Why the ‘Green Economy’ Is Suddenly in Retreat—in EU, US, and on Wall Street

Jon Miltimore July 30, 2024 @ American Institute for Economic Research 

 

Near The Hague, Dutch farmers protest against government’s forced shrinking of livestock herds. 2019.

In February, a stream of tractors driven by Italian farmers arrived at the outskirts of Rome, horns blaring. The scene, which was captured by the Agence France-Presse, was just one of dozens of protests across Europe against EU regulations that farmers said threatened to put them out of work.

“They’re drowning us with all these regulations,” one farmer at a protest in Pamplona, Spain, told The Guardian. “They need to ease up on all the directives and bureaucracy.”

The protests were nothing new. They began in 2019 when Dutch farmers, for the first time, drove some 2,000 tractors to The Hague to protest radical legislation designed to reduce carbon emissions, which disproportionately impacted farmers.

Dutch lawmakers responded in 2022 by passing legislation that required farms near nature reserves to slash nitrogen emissions by 70 percent.

“About 30 percent of the country’s cows and pigs will have to go,” The Economist noted.

The policy was part of the government’s plan to sharply reduce livestock farming in Europe. The thinking was that since the livestock sector contributes to about a third of all nitrogen emissions globally, the government would have to target farmers to meet its goal to cut nitrogen emissions in half by 2030.

So Dutch farmers were given a bleak choice: give a portion of their land to the government or have it taken away. By 2023, some 750 Dutch farmers had reportedly sold their land as part of the state’s buy-out scheme. Others were still trying to find a way to preserve their livelihoods.

When asked by a reporter in 2023 whether he thought he would be able to pass his farm on to his children, one Dutch farmer struggled to speak.

“No,” he said tearfully. “No.”

The ‘Great Green Retreat’?

Farmers are not the only ones unhappy with Brussels’s aggressive war on climate change.

The European Union’s effort to reach “net zero” CO₂ emissions by 2050 has rankled voters across the continent, something political leaders seem to have realized. Earlier this year, The Guardian lamented the EU’s “great green retreat,” which included a pullback on a bevy of “Green New Deal” regulations, including:

• Plans to put sharp new restrictions on the use of pesticides.
• Bans on PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances), man-made chemicals that are used in countless everyday products.
• Rules restricting new industrial emission, which were relaxed on industries and tweaked to exclude cattle farms altogether.
• Calls to relax a pending anti-deforestation law, which, according to Reuters, officials believe could hurt European farmers.

Whether this retreat stemmed from concerns that these environmental regulations would cause serious harm to the economy (and European farmers), or from concern that the Green agenda would lead to a bloodbath at the ballot box, is unclear.

Whatever the case, the reversal didn’t prevent a historic defeat for Green parties in June’s European Parliament elections, which saw them lose a third of their seats.

“There is no sugarcoating it,” the New York Times lamented following the June elections, “the Greens tanked.”

Political scientist Ruy Teixeira described the event as a “Greenlash.”

“In Germany, the core country of the European green movement, support for the Greens plunged from 20.5 percent in 2019 to 12 percent,” Teixeira, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, noted.

He continued:

Shockingly, among voters under 25, the German Greens actually did worse than the hard right Alternative for Germany (AfD). That contrasts with the 2019 elections, when the Greens did seven times better than the AfD among these young voters.

And in France, Green support crashed from 13.5 percent to 5.5 percent. The latter figure is barely above the required threshold for party representation in the French delegation.

Bans Against Hot Showers and Swimming Pools?

Pundits across the world are still trying to figure out why Green parties crashed so hard, which leads one to wonder if they were paying attention.

It wasn’t just crackdowns on farming. Facing an energy crisis, governments across Europe began to roll out regulations forcing Europeans to adopt, shall we say, more spartan lifestyles.

“Cold swimming pools, chillier offices, and shorter showers are the new normal for Europeans,” Business Insider reported, “as governments crack down on energy use ahead of winter to prevent shortages.”

In other words, instead of producing or purchasing more energy, governments began to crack down on energy consumption.

It didn’t stop there.

In May 2023, months after Germany shut down its last three remaining nuclear power plants, the Financial Times reported that many Germans were “outraged and furious” at a law that forced them to install heating systems that run on renewable fuels, which are far more expensive than gas-powered boilers.

The action was even more invasive than the European Union’s sprawling ban on gas-powered vehicles that was finalized just months before.

“[The EU] has taken an important step towards zero-emission mobility,” EU environment commissioner Frans Timmermans said on Twitter. “The direction is clear: in 2035 new cars and vans must have zero emissions.”

Wall Street’s $14 Trillion Exit

The Green policies emerging from Europe did little to alleviate Americans’ concerns that the climate policies of central planners are not driven by sound economics. Yet many similar policies have taken root in the US.

As of March 2024, no fewer than nine US states had passed laws to ban the sale of gas-powered cars by 2035. Meanwhile, the Biden administration recently doubled down on an EPA policy to begin a coerced phase-out of gas-powered vehicles — even though the federal effort to build out the charging stations to support EVs has flopped spectacularly (despite $7.5 billion in funding).

Despite federal subsidies for EVs, a majority of Americans remain unsold on them, and the sputtering EV market has left a wake of carnage. In June, the EV automaker Fisker Inc., which in 2011 received half a billion dollars in guaranteed loans from the US Department of Energy, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Delaware. (Fisker had long drawn comparisons to Solyndra, the solar panel company that went belly up in 2011 just two years after receiving $535 million from the US government.)

Fisker’s bankruptcy came just months after the New York Times reported on a massive exodus of capital from Climate Action 100+, the world’s largest investor initiative on climate change. JPMorgan Chase and State Street pulled all funds, while BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, reduced its holdings and “scaled back its ties to the group.”

“All told, the moves amount to a nearly $14 trillion exit from an organization meant to marshal Wall Street’s clout to expand the climate agenda,” the Times reported.

Days after the Times report, PIMCO also announced it was leaving Climate Action 100+. Invesco, which manages $1.6 trillion in assets, made its exit just two weeks later.

‘You Cannot Avoid the Consequences of Avoiding Reality’

There’s no doubt that the Green economy is in retreat, but the question is, Why?

First, it’s becoming apparent — especially in Europe where energy is more scarce and expensive — that people are souring on Green policies.

As Teixera noted, voters don’t actually like being told what car they must drive and how to cook their food and heat their homes. If you own a swimming pool, you probably want to be able to heat it.

Policymakers talk about “quitting” fossil fuels, but in recent years Europeans got to experience an actual fossil-fuel shortage following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which disrupted fossil fuel imports. The result was energy rationing, something Europeans don’t seem to care for.

This brings me to my second point. Green parties and environmentalists have had success largely by getting people to focus on the desired effect of their policies (saving people from climate change) and to ignore the costs of their policies.

Politicians seem to grasp that their policies come with trade-offs, which is why their bans and climate targets tend to be 10, 15, or 30 years into the future. This allows them to bask in the glow of their climate altruism without dealing with the economic consequences of their policies.

This is one of the most salient differences between economics and politics. Economics is all about understanding the reality of trade-offs, but politics is primarily about ignoring or concealing these realities.

Few understood this better than the economist Henry Hazlitt, the author of Economics in One Lesson, who wrote time and again about the tendency of politicians to overlook the secondary consequences of their policies, which were responsible for “nine-tenths of the economic fallacies that are working such dreadful harm in the world today.”

For a time, politicians were able to ignore the secondary consequences of their policies. But voters are finally getting a taste of the costs of Green policies, and they don’t like it.

“You can avoid reality,” Ayn Rand once noted, “but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality.”

An ‘Iron’ Law

Fear of climate change has helped progressives and Greens gain more economic control in recent decades, but even fear has its limits.

Teixera points to Roger Pielke, Jr., a University of Colorado Boulder professor who in 2009 wrote about the “iron law of climate policy.”

“Climate policy, they say, requires sacrifice, as economic growth and environmental progress are necessarily incompatible with one another,” he wrote. “This perspective has even been built into the scenarios of the IPCC.”

Whether one accepts this premise — that economic growth and environmental progress are necessarily incompatible — doesn’t matter. What matters is that when economic growth policies collide with emission reduction targets, economics wins.

It’s one thing to say that gas prices should be $9 a gallon, as physicist Steven Chu once did, because climate change is a dire threat. It’s another thing to say this while trying to become Energy Secretary, as Chu was while testifying before the Senate in 2012:

Sen. Mike Lee: “So are you saying you no longer share the view that we need to figure out how to boost gasoline prices in America?”

Chu: “I no longer share that view… Of course we don’t want the price of gasoline to go up; we want it to go down.”

You can call this the “iron law of climate policy,” or you can call it common sense. (Who wants gas to go to $9 a gallon?)  Essentially, it’s lofty environmental goals colliding with economic and political reality.

This phenomenon is also conspicuous in Joe Biden’s presidency. On day one, the president nixed the Keystone XL Pipeline (for inexplicable reasons), and would go on to declare global warming a greater existential threat than a nuclear war.

Yet he would later boast that his policies were lowering gasoline prices, and that he oversaw record-high US oil production.

This is the iron law of climate policy, and it explains why the Green economy is suddenly in retreat all over the world.

Not-So-‘Green’ Policies

The reality is that the Green agenda comes with steep trade-offs, something Europeans, Americans, and Wall Street are finally beginning to admit.  But Europe’s energy policies haven’t just been unpopular; many of them haven’t even been “Green.”

For starters, electrical vehicles are hardly the environmental panacea many claim them to be. In fact, EVs require much more energy to produce on average than gas-powered vehicles, and also often run on electricity generated by fossil fuels. This means that EVs come with their own carbon footprints, and they tend to be much larger than most realize. 

An analysis by the Wall Street Journal found that shifting all personal vehicles in the U.S to EVs would reduce global CO₂ emissions by only 0.18 percent. This would do virtually nothing to change global CO₂ emission trends, which data show are rising not because of European or US personal vehicles, but from emerging economies like China. 

And then there’s Germany’s bizarre decision to abandon nuclear power. Despite an eleventh-hour plea from a group of scientists (including two Nobel laureates) who urged lawmakers not to do so because it would exacerbate climate change, Germany closed its last three nuclear power plants — Emsland in Lower Saxony, Neckarwestheim 2 in Baden-Württemberg, and Isar 2 in Bavaria — in the middle of an energy crisis. 

The move puzzled many around the world. After all, nuclear energy is cleaner and safer than any other energy source with the exception of solar, according to estimates from Our World in Data. Even more bizarre, Germany’s phaseout of nuclear power, which began in 2011, coincided with a return to coal. 

Germany’s decision to ramp up coal production and shutter its last nuclear plants is hardly consistent with the EU’s view that climate change is a dire threat to human kind, many noted.

“No less a climate-change evangelist than Greta Thunberg has argued publicly that, for the planet’s sake, Germany should prioritize the use of its existing nuclear facilities over burning coal,” journalist Markham Heid pointed out at Vox.

Meanwhile, in the US, where nuclear power has been steadily attacked for decades by politicians and environmentalists, the Senate quietly passed (by a vote of 80–2!) a bill to support the deployment of nuclear facilities.

These anecdotes illustrate an important point: Green policies are not just unpopular and uneconomical; they are often senseless.

Few understand this better than Dutch farmers, who are being forced to sell off their farms by politicians who have little understanding of economics trade offs.

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Jon Miltimore

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

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Fraud is Still a Crime, Including Green Fraud!

By Rich Kozlovich 

Daniel Greenfield published this piece entitled,  Environmentalists Killed Logging to Protect Owls. Now They Want to Kill the Owls, saying:

Thirty-five years after “save a logger, eat an owl” could be seen across the Pacific Northwest, the government environmentalists at US Fish and Wildlife want to kill half a million owls….......the Owl Wars that entered the 1990 presidential election seem implausible. But they cost tens of thousands of jobs, wiped out sizable amounts of the logging industry in the Pacific Northwest........listing the spotted owls as an endangered species. The northern spotted owls (which to non-owl fanciers look like most other owls except smaller) were listed as endangered by that noted scientist, Judge William L. Dwyer, who apart from destroying logging also helped create the Seattle Mariners which placed two crimes against humanity on his checkered soul.

Okay, "noted scientist" was for those who didn't get it, was a bit of snarc, and rightly so.  But being wrong is legendary for the environmental movement, right along with lying, and corruptly using the Endangered Species Act as a bludgeon for their fallacious claims.  

This insanity didn't only kill jobs, it killed forests, and people.  In October of 2022 Kevin Nelson, posted this article, Two Words Explain California’s Wildfire Woes: Spotted Owl, saying:

Some things in life are hard to understand and explain. The theory of relativity, for example, or the origins of black holes. Other things are easy to grasp, however,  Such as: California’s wildfire woes. In the past five years summer and fall firestorms have killed dozens of people, wiped out homes, businesses and entire communities, torched millions of acres of forestlands, caused billions in property losses, and swept away untold numbers of animals and wildlife.

The cause of all this wreckage is easy to pinpoint. It’s simple as two words: spotted owl.........The fight was over protecting the owl’s habitat. After lawsuits, protests and even violence, the environmentalists won............. delivered a death blow to an entire way of life. Sawmills shut down, loggers lost their jobs, and those little backwoods lumber towns went from boom to 1930s Depression-era bust.............

At the risk of over-simplification, the prevailing forest management wisdom in the post-spotted owl era has been: Don’t touch those trees. Leave ‘em where they be, for people coming up from the city to enjoy on the weekends. And sue and regulate the hell out of anyone who dares try to make a profit by harvesting them

It wasn't logging that decimated the spotted owl population, it was the barred owl.  Repeal the Endangered Species Act and remove enforcement authority from the Fish and Wildlife Service, or even better, eliminate the Fish and Wildlife Service. 

Their claims about owls, frogs, polar bears, honey bees, and more, were outright lies, misrepresentation of the facts, or speculation without foundation.  A common thread in all environmentalist writings.  But who really got that ball rolling was  Rachel Carson's and her "science fiction" book Silent Spring ultimately causing the unscientific ban on DDT.

As an  exterminator for 40 years who wrote extensively defending my industry I had to do a great deal of reading delving into the twisted reasonings of the green movement and it wasn't long before I began to realize everything they say is a lie, speculation, logical fallacies, and projection, with just enough truth to give the impression what they're promoting is right and true, mostly based on emotion. 

From that point on no matter what they promoted I started out with the valid premise it was a lie, and then did the research to find what was a valid and what was not, then develop the intellectual response to show why it's a lie.  

I posted this article in March of this year, Junk Science Thirteen Years Ago, saying:  I have to point out this was 13 years ago and nothing has changed.  We know the scientific fraud perpetrated to promote global warming initiatives, we know alternative energy is a bust, we know the EPA is corrupt to it's core, we know sustainability is a code word for the imposition of big government tyranny, and we knew it 13 years ago. 

So why are we still listening to these misfits promoting it.  Nitwits like John Kerry who thinks the world would like Russia better if they were more concerned about emissions.  How delusional is this man?  However, we know two things for sure from that.  Kerry is a blithering idiot, and we dodged a gigantic bullet when it wasn't elected President.  We can thank the Swift Boaters for that, not Karl Rove.  

No matter what the media and others regurgitate about ‘science,’ it’s always about money and control - People should know by now that they can’t trust so-called experts, and they certainly should not believe anyone who makes absurd claims in the name of “science.” ......

Whether it's endangered species, global warming, endocrine disruption, or any other green meme, it all ended up being lies, and many times promoted by scientists who abandoned truth in favor of grant money.  And the EPA has been party to this, and as my now passed friend Jay Lehr, one of the founders of EPA, the EPA needs to be dismantled.

The end of the Chevron Deference should help to end a lot of the tyranny of these agencies. but the question I keep coming back to is now that we know all their claims were lies, and government agencies, and the heads of these agencies had to know their claims were lies, how do we make it right?  

• When will someone finally realize all these environmental movements are blatantly promoting fraud.  The last I heard fraud is a crime?
• When will someone finally realize it's only these green organizations who are promoting fraud, but also those who fund them, and the agencies that enable them?
• When will someone finally realize this is all part of a massive international criminal enterprise, and decide an equally massive RICO investigation is needed?  
• When will someone finally realize someone needs to be sent to prison over all this?

As I watch the events unfolding all around the world I look at those who are in leadership roles, and I can't help but think of the words of one of my personal heroes, Col. John Boyd who said:   "One day you will come to a fork in the road. And you're going to have to make a decision about what direction you want to go."..... "To be somebody or to do something. In life there is often a roll call. That's when you will have to make a decision. To be or to do? Which way will you go?"

Definition leads to clarity, and it's clear the time as come to make the decision do properly define these people as the enemy of all mankind, with dark pursuits, and darker goals.  

Update:  Talk about fraud!  The Ninth Circuit shoots down COVID vaccine.  The COVID shot was put on trial in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and coming from California the result might surprise you.  Three of four judges agree it was never a “traditional vaccine” and therefore could not legally be mandated. ....

I really like seeing this as so many of us were saying this from very early on and criticized .... seriously criticized, including by scientists who until then worked together to expose junk science.  Now I really do want someone to go to jail as untold numbers are people are dying from these false vaccines that were in reality gene manipulating chemical compounds. 

Environmentalists Killed Logging to Protect Owls. Now They Want to Kill the Owls.

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog 

Thirty-five years after “save a logger, eat an owl” could be seen across the Pacific Northwest, the government environmentalists at US Fish and Wildlife want to kill half a million owls…to save the owls.

In a world of transgender surgeries, terrorist cryptocurrencies, and senile presidents, the Owl Wars that entered the 1990 presidential election seem implausible. But they cost tens of thousands of jobs, wiped out sizable amounts of the logging industry in the Pacific Northwest, and helped solidify Oregon and Washington as hipster strongholds no Republican could win.

It all started with listing the spotted owls as an endangered species. The northern spotted owls (which to non-owl fanciers look like most other owls except smaller) were listed as endangered by that noted scientist, Judge William L. Dwyer, who apart from destroying logging also helped create the Seattle Mariners which placed two crimes against humanity on his checkered soul.

But Dwyer was doing the bidding of the anti-industrial Sierra Club and decided to block timber sales in national forests to save the owls.

“The timber industry no longer drives the Pacific Northwest’s economy,” Judge Dwyer, whose own job as a government appointee was protected by the mandatory confiscation used to pay his ill-gotten salary, wrote. “Job losses in the wood-products industry will continue regardless of whether the northern spotted owl is protected.”

Over 1,500 loggers and family members staged a protest around Hood River, of the kind that has since become familiar in Europe, against the shutdown of their industry.

President George H.W. Bush in his usual squishy manner tried to split the difference. “All across the country, we have a spotted owl problem. And yes, we want to see that little furry, feathery guy protected and all of that. But I don’t want to see 40,000 loggers thrown out of work.”

Bill Clinton, who did want to see 40,000 loggers thrown out of work, won and held an owl summit in Portland on April Fool’s Day featuring Al Gore and a protest rally led by Neil Young. The result of the summit was that the millionaire hipsters and environmentalists who had funded the Clintons won and the loggers who were just trying to feed their families came out the losers.

Clinton cut 80% of logging. Timber prices rose 70% in the first years of the Clinton administration. Housing construction costs rose with it further hurting the middle class. Seattle and Portland became safe spaces for fans of Neil Young and bad music. Republicans, conservatives, and the working class were squeezed out to make way for the owls.

But a funny thing happened on the way to owl nirvana, the owls kept dying.

Logging on federal lands fell by 90% but spotted owl populations also fell by as much as 80%. The number of “furry, feathery guys” today is down 75% since Bill Clinton, Judge Dwyer, and the Sierra Club wiped out loggers to protect them. And owl numbers are falling 2.9% every year.

Environmentalists railed that the Trump administration’s expansion of forest areas where loggers could work was “heartbreaking”, “callous” and “offensive” to an “endangered species”.

But the real threat to the spotted owls wasn’t the loggers, but other owls. Environmentalists had known and lied about the fact that barred owls were expanding their territory and driving out the spotted owls. But the spotted owls provided a convenient excuse for a government power grab.

And now if the spotted owls disappear so does the excuse for government abuses of power.

That’s why US Fish and Wildlife has discussed killing the owls to save the owls. The proposal would use “trained shooters” to kill 470,000 barred owls. (And if enough of the barred owls are killed by the government, maybe they can be listed as an endangered species and protected.)

The Endangered Species Act was supposed to be used to protect species threatened by human behavior, but now the environmentalists are protecting owls from other owls by killing the owls. The same government environmentalists who bemoan the hunters who wiped out the passenger pigeon are now proposing to do the same thing to take sides in the owl wars.

But which owls live or die is not up to us. Nature has its own free market economy. And no amount of shooting barred owls will save the spotted owls. The trouble is that the spotted owls are interbreeding with barred owls. And unless the environmentalists can convince spotted owls to avoid owl miscegenation, the outcome will be some sort of mixed spotted barred owl.

The Biden administration has proposed killing the mixed spotted barred owl because owl miscegenation can only be solved with total owl genocide. The government has already decided which owls belong in Oregon and the Creator, nature, and biology don’t get a say in it. Why can’t nature listen to the “experts”, “scientists” and government instead of doing its own thing?

The Owl Wars have been going on for over three decades now. Since Neil Young and Kenny Loggins were warbling about owls in Portland, the pro-logger Bush administration was replaced by the pro-owl Clinton administration, and then by the pro-logger Bush administration, then the pro-owl Obama administration, the pro-logger Trump administration, and now the pro-owl and anti-owl Biden administration which will save the owls and kill the owls at the same time.

The number of loggers and owls has been declining so the only winners are the government and the barred owls which paid no attention to the judges, presidentists, and environmentalists.

After claiming to love the animals, environmentalists are turning to violence to fight nature. But violence has always been at the root of environmental and other forms of leftist activism.

The Biden administration appointed Tracy Stone-Manning, a former spokeswoman for the eco-terrorist group EarthFirst, to head the Bureau of Land Management. Manning had sent a threatening letter in 1989 warning that the eco-terrorist group had rigged trees with traps. “You bastards go in there anyway and a lot of people could get hurt.”

Tree spikes planted by EarthFirst had wounded a number of loggers and mill workers.

But Tracy and the other government ecoterrorists may find that it’s easier to stop loggers than it is to stop the course of nature no matter how many people or animals they try to kill.

It is difficult to say which is the more invasive species: the barred owls or the government. The coming showdown between the barred owls and the “trained shooters” of US Fish and Wildlife will also determine who decides the fate of the owl population: environmentalists or the owls.

G-d in His infinite wisdom made all the many varieties of owls, but only human beings could be stupid enough to create government, the Sierra Club, and the US Fish and Wildlife Service. In a contest between the works of G-d and the idiot works of man, the government has no chance.

After wiping out logging to save the owls, the government now wants to kill the owls.

My money is on the owls. 

 

(Daniel Greenfield will be appearing at the AFA's Literary Cafe on July 14th, Bastille Day, at the Luxe Sunset Boulevard Hotel, to discuss the American and French revolutions and the origins of our struggle against the Left.)

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.

If Green Prediction Was a Corporation, They'd Have a Monopoly on Being Wrong!

By Rich Kozlovich

What inspired this article was this piece, Portland Power Company Takes Control of Home Thermostats to Avoid Outages saying:

Some 200,000 people in the Portland, Oregon, area have handed control of their home thermostats over to an energy company.  What is there to say about a population willing to hand over control of its thermostats to an energy company instead of demanding its government provide enough energy to keep it comfortable?  These people are gerbils.......I’m sure that in their own deluded minds, they have convinced themselves they are noble and virtuous by making this sacrifice for the good of Mother Earth.......And who do these superstitious enviro-nuts believe…? A bunch of witches who have been wrong 54 times out of 54 times.

The linked article is a regularly continually updated piece saying: 

For more than 50 years Climate Alarmists in the scientific community and environmental movement have not gotten even one prediction correct, but they do have a perfect record of getting 41 [updated to 54] predictions wrong.m In other words, on at least 41 occasions, these so-called experts have predicted some terrible environmental catastrophe was imminent … and it never happened. And not once — not even once! — have these alarmists had one of their predictions come true.

The author goes on to list all these failures, and it isn't just about global warming.  He goes on to say:

Sorry, Experts… Sorry, Scientific Consensus… Only a fool comes running for the 42nd cry of wolf.

Over the years I've written extensively on the scientific fraud known as anthropogenic global warming, and linked and published many more, but I've also published and linked much about the green/left prediction failures.  By the way, according to these nitwits here's a complete list of things they claim global warming causes.  But time and truth are on the same side, and now..........watch out, here it comes, ........ they're admitting they were....Oh Nooooooo....Say it Ain't So Joe.........They were wrong!  

‘They’ shrieked about ‘global warming’ — but now they admit we were ‘accidentally cooling’ .......When the earth didn’t warm up as much as they predicted, they changed the terminology from global warming to climate change. When hundreds of dire predictions never came true, and they had no scientific data to support their policies to destroy industries and our quality and way of life, they just made things up, just like they did with COVID.......

Well, I've posted a lot about their predictions, and, as noted physicist Niels Bohr is alleged to have said: "It’s Difficult to Make Predictions, especially about the future."  So, allow me to share a few selected posts on the monopoly the green/left has on wrong. 

They ignore the things that are known because they're inconvenient, and fail to support their false narratives.  As for the things they don't know, they make up.  For those scientists who know better and fail to take a stand remaining silent, they are in effect in support of these lies, and cannot escape their culpability.   

In the movie “A Man For All Seasons” Sir Thomas More was accused of being against the king's divorce and remarriage because he remained silent on this issue. He stated in the trial there was no evidence he was against the marriage.  

 

His accusers claimed everyone knows his silence demonstrated he was against the marriage.  He responded this was a court of law, and this wasn't an issue of what everyone knows, it was an issue of law, because in law “silence denotes agreement”.   So it does in the real world also.

1. California's a Mess, And It's Not My Fault, Part IV By Rich Kozlovich
2. WRONG AS USUAL! By Tom Harris
3. Thirty Years of Global Warming Prophecies, By Warren Beatty
4.  Environmentalists Almost Have a Monopoly on Being Wrong, By Rich Kozlovich 
5. 5 environmentalist ideas that have spectacularly backfired. By The green fraud
   
6.  18 Spectacularly Wrong Predictions Were Made Around the Time of the First Earth Day in 1970, Expect More This Year, By Mark J. Perry
7.  A Prince Who Was Potty, is Now a King Who is Potty, and Dangerously So! By Rich Kozlovich
8. Another Nail In the Global Warming Coffin, By John Hinderaker
9.  Is There a Penalty For Wrong Predictions?, By John Hinderaker
10.  Why are the predictions on climate change always so wrong? By Jack Hellner
11. On global warming, so many problems with the data, By Jack Hellner
12. Greenpeace Wrong — The Great Barrier Reef Is Thriving!, By Dr. Jay Lehr and Tom Harris
13. Charlie's a Loon, By Rich Kozlovich
14. Mitt Romney: Master troll, By John Green
15. How To Think Like A Liberal Supreme Court Justice By Francis Menton
16. Good news sucks for climate cultists, By Ron Ross
17. Biden Administration Has Issues With Science and Sanity, By Rich Kozlovich
18. Global Warming and How Some Things Never Change, By Rich Kozlovich 
19. It’s Earth Day. Again. Contain Your Excitement, By Steven Hayward
20. Prediction is Really Hard: Especially About The Future!, By Rich Kozlovich

Well, that's 20, and there are many more, but I think that will do for now.  You may wish to review my

Ross McKitrick exposed the global warming fallacies of the Hockey Stick Chart and the IPCC reports, so, let's end with this quote by him from many years ago saying:

I have been probing the arguments for global warming for well over a decade. In collaboration with a lot of excellent coauthors I have consistently found that when the layers get peeled back, what lies at the core is either flawed, misleading or simply non-existent.  

I think that pretty much says it all.

18 Spectacularly Wrong Predictions Were Made Around the Time of the First Earth Day in 1970, Expect More This Year

By Mark J. Perry April 21, 2022 

Editor's Note:  This appeared here. I've not asked for nor have I received permission to publish this in full, but given the state of things, I think this needs as broad a distribution possible.  If the author objects, I will break it down to a link.  RK

Tomorrow is Earth Day 2022 and marks the 52nd anniversary of Earth Day, so it’s time for my annual CD post on the spectacularly wrong predictions that were made around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970.

In the May 2000 issue of Reason Magazine, award-winning science correspondent Ronald Bailey wrote an excellent article titled “Earth Day, Then and Now: The planet’s future has never looked better. Here’s why” to provide some historical perspective on the 30th anniversary of Earth Day. In that article, Bailey noted that around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970, and in the years following, there was a “torrent of apocalyptic predictions” and many of those predictions were featured in his Reason article. Well, it’s now the 51st anniversary of Earth Day, and a good time to ask the question again that Bailey asked 21 years ago: How accurate were the predictions made around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970? The answer: “The prophets of doom were not simply wrong, but spectacularly wrong,” according to Bailey. Here are 18 examples of the spectacularly wrong predictions made around 1970 when the “green holy day” (aka Earth Day) started:

1. Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years [by 1985 or 2000] unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”

2. “We are in an environmental crisis that threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation,” wrote Washington University biologist Barry Commoner in the Earth Day issue of the scholarly journal Environment.

3. The day after the first Earth Day, the New York Times editorial page warned, “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”

4. “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in the April 1970 issue of Mademoiselle. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years [by 1980].”

5. “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” wrote Paul Ehrlich in a 1969 essay titled “Eco-Catastrophe! “By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”

6. Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the 1970 Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.”

7. “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” declared Denis Hayes, the chief organizer for Earth Day, in the Spring 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness.

8. Peter Gunter, a North Texas State University professor, wrote in 1970, “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China, and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”

Note: The prediction of famine in South America is partly true, but only in Venezuela and only because of socialism, not for environmental reasons.

9. In January 1970, Life reported, “Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”

10. Ecologist Kenneth Watt told Time that, “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.”

11. Barry Commoner predicted that decaying organic pollutants would use up all of the oxygen in America’s rivers, causing freshwater fish to suffocate.

12. Paul Ehrlich chimed in, predicting in 1970 that “air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” Ehrlich sketched a scenario in which 200,000 Americans would die in 1973 during “smog disasters” in New York and Los Angeles.

13. Paul Ehrlich warned in the May 1970 issue of Audubon that DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons “may have substantially reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945.” Ehrlich warned that Americans born since 1946…now had a life expectancy of only 49 years, and he predicted that if current patterns continued this expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980 when it might level out. (Note: According to the most recent CDC report, life expectancy in the US is 78.6 years).

14. Ecologist Kenneth Watt declared, “By the year 2000 if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say,`I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’”

Note: Global oil production last year at about 95M barrels per day (bpd) was double the global oil output of 48M bpd around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970.

15. Harrison Brown, a scientist at the National Academy of Sciences, published a chart in Scientific American that looked at metal reserves and estimated that humanity would totally run out of copper shortly after 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would be gone before 1990.

16. Sen. Gaylord Nelson wrote in Look, “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”

17. In 1975, Paul Ehrlich predicted that “since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next 30 years or so [by 2005], it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it.”

18. Kenneth Watt warned about a pending Ice Age in a speech. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years,” he declared. “If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an Ice Age.”

MP: Let’s keep those spectacularly wrong predictions from the first Earth Day 1970 in mind when we’re bombarded again this year with dire predictions of “gloom and doom” and “existential threats” due to climate change. And let’s think about the question posed by Ronald Bailey in 2000: What will Earth look like when Earth Day 60 rolls around in 2030?

Bailey predicts a much cleaner, and much richer future world, with less hunger and malnutrition, less poverty, longer life expectancy, and lower mineral and metal prices. But he makes one final prediction about Earth Day 2030: 

“There will be a disproportionately influential group of doomsters predicting that the future – and the present – never looked so bleak.”

In other words, the hype, hysteria, and spectacularly wrong apocalyptic predictions will continue, promoted by virtue-signaling “environmental grievance hustlers” like AOC, who said several years ago that we have “only 12 years left to stop the worst impacts of climate change.”