Ecological Balance

I was having a discussion about this and that at Talk Polywell and one of my correspondents said:

...many of them both unnecessary and unsustainable. A truly civilized society would maintain an ecological balance and still be able to visit the planets.

And I said:

Humanity is unsustainable. We will go on for as long as we can.

In 1900 it was estimated that New York would be buried in horse crap by 1920 if things kept going the way they were going. Obviously they did not.

Ecological balance is pure fantasy. Because things (on all scales) are always fluctuating. Not to mention new organisms. (bird flu, swine flu)

Ecological balance before or after a large volcanic eruption? Ecological balance before or after a very large meteor strike? Ecological balance before or after the onset of an ice age?

So just exactly which ecological balance is the best? And how do you keep it?

These ecological balance folks have delusions of grandeur.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Green Power: Black Death

Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death
The author of this book is Paul Driessen. And just who is Paul Driessen?

Driessen received his bachelor's degree in geology and field ecology from Lawrence University, JD from the University of Denver College of Law, and accreditation in public relations from the Public Relations Society of America.

Driessen is currently a senior policy advisor for the Congress of Racial Equality and a senior fellow with the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise and the Atlas Economic Research Foundation.

During a 25 year career, that included staff tenures with the Department of the Interior and an energy trade association, he has spoken and written frequently on energy and environmental policy, global climate change, corporate social responsibility and other topics. He has also written articles and professional papers on marine life associated with oil platforms off the coasts of California and Louisiana – and produced a video documentary on the subject.

A geologist interested in climate change? What will they think of next?

Paul has some interesting friends. One of them, Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace has this to say about the book.

“The environmental movement I helped found has lost its objectivity, morality and humanity. The pain and suffering it is inflicting on families in developing countries must no longer be tolerated. This is the first book I’ve seen that tells the truth and lays it on the line. It’s a must-read for anyone who cares about people, progress and our planet.”

Another Friend of Paul is Niger Innis. Who is Niger Innis?

Niger Innis currently serves as the National Spokesman for the Congress of Racial Equality. He works closely with the National Chairman and represents CORE across the country. He is a MSNBC contributor on the 24-hour news network providing insight and analysis on the day's news events.

And what does Niger have to say about the war on the poor waged by "back to the stone age" environmentalists?

Liberal politicians and environmental activists continue to say we must switch to “green” energy. Oil, gas, coal and nuclear must go, they insist.

Informed voters support conservation and alternative energy. But they know fossil and nuclear fuels created health and living standards unprecedented in history.

Over two-thirds of American voters support increased onshore and offshore drilling. They know world energy demand is surging, while US production is prohibited and declining. They realize anti-drilling policies don’t just cause unemployment and cost us trillions in lost lease bonus, royalty and tax revenues.

Those policies also wage an immoral war on poor families. They destroy jobs, erode civil rights gains, and force minority and elderly households to choose between food, fuel, rent and medicine.

Since 2006, the cost of driving a 25-mpg car 10,000 miles has risen $600. Heating and air-conditioning costs – and the price of everything we eat, wear and do – continue to soar. While higher income families spend a nickel of every dollar on energy, families at the bottom of our economic scale spend up to half of their incomes on gasoline, heating and cooling.

This is intolerable and unnecessary. We have centuries’ worth of oil, gas, oil shale, coal and uranium – and we can develop them without harming the environment.

But environmental radicals in and out of Congress refuse to let us do so. They want to force us to switch to renewables, even though there is a yawning chasm between 0.5% of US energy produced by wind and solar power – and 93% produced with hydrocarbon and nuclear power.

The eventual switch to alternative energy is obviously decades away. Meanwhile, we are sending up to $700 billion a year to Russia , Iran , Venezuela , Saudi Arabia and other countries – in the midst of our worst economic crisis in memory.

People are justifiably angry that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi refused to allow a debate or vote on ending congressional drilling bans. The only “energy” bills she supports would open few areas, while adding more taxes, regulations, lawsuits, delays, price hikes, and renewable-energy mandates and subsidies. They will produce little or no new energy.

Here is a review of the book by A Customer on the Amazon page linked above.

Before reading this exceptional primer on the negative effects of modern environmentalism, I was clueless of the far-reaching costs that group's policies have had on the Third World. Driesen documents at length the effect radical environmentalism has had on Africa's struggling poor, who want nothing more than to benefit from the same energy sources and standard of living the First World takes for granted. He shows how DDT saved thousands of lives in Africa by protecting families from malaria, while radical Greens fought to eliminate the benign chemical because of a theoretical risk it posed to birds. When families were restricted from using the chemical on their huts in Africa, malaria deaths shot through the roof. Driesen lays the blame for those thousands of deaths at the doorstep of the Sierra Club and other like-minded groups who would rather maintain a politically correct notion of what good environmentalism is rather than save actual lives.

Driesen goes on to show how environmentalists keep the Third World populations in poverty by fighting against the use of traditional, affordable sources of energy like coal and fossil fuels. Instead, Greens think other sources like wind and solar should be the only option for these people, disregarding the fact that the technology is no where near advanced enough to provide the energy needs these populations need to pull themselves out of poverty. Ironically, it would take over 10,000 acres of windmills to generate the same amount of electricity a 2-3 acre fossil fuel plant produces. So much for "saving the land."

Driesen does not endorse using fossil fuels forever and ever amen. In fact, he wants nothing more than for the world to develop and invest in alternative energy because he knows as well as everyone else the day will come when we have no other choice. He simply believes (and rightly so) that, in the mean time, the problems of the Third World are real and not theoretical like so many Green "concerns", and that First World governments should not be intimidated by radical Greens and NGOs in their efforts to employ free-trade and responsible investment in these areas. One of the books biggest themes is how unfair it is that NGOs are not held to the same standards of accountability and transparency they constantly demand from for-profit corporations.

Paul and Willie Soon have written a piece with a publication date of June 7, 2009.

Sub-Saharan Africa remains one of Earth's most impoverished regions. Over 90% of its people still lack electricity, running water, proper sanitation and decent housing. Malaria, malnutrition, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS and intestinal diseases kill millions every year. Life expectancy is appalling, and falling.

And yet UN officials, European politicians, environmentalist groups and even African authorities insist that global warming is the gravest threat facing the continent. They claim there is no longer any debate over human-caused global warming - but ignore thousands of scientists who say human CO2 emissions are not the primary cause of climate changes, there is no evidence that future warming will be catastrophic, and computer models do not provide valid projections or "scenarios" for the future.

[Global] Warming alarmists use the "specter of climate change" to justify inhumane policies and shift the blame for problems that could be solved with the very technologies they oppose.

Past colonialism sought to develop mining, forestry and agriculture, and bring better government and healthcare practices to Africa . Eco-colonialism keeps Africans "traditional" and "indigenous," by insisting that modern technologies are harmful and not "sustainable" in Africa.

Let me see if I get this? A healthy prosperous Africa is unsustainable, but millions of African children dying every year can be continued indefinitely. You know, if the Austrian Corporal had proposed such a thing we would call these policies genocidal. But wrap it all it green swaddling and it is "saving the earth". You have to wonder what the greenies have against the poor and people of color? Is it possible they are practicers of covert racism?

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Got A Degree?

I was just looking at ECO World and came across an interesting analysis of what it would cost to lower global temps 1°C. It is a pretty good analysis and I'm not going to review it because they do it better than I can. However, their conclusion is worth some attention.

The imperative to dramatically curtail fossil fuel use rests on the precautionary principle. Maybe the earth’s climate isn’t going to catastrophically tip because of CO2 emissions, but we should do it anyway just in case. But there are two sides to this argument. Our position is we should use those trillions to build roads, hospitals, power plants, reforestation, aquifer replenishment, and medical (and other scientific) research. We should nurture free trade, free markets, and entrepreneurship. We should deliver to humanity the universal prosperity that is the destiny of our generation. Then by sometime between 2025 and 2050, we will have created economic abundance, we will have advanced technology, and we will be well positioned to handle whatever the climate may throw at us.

Now there is an ecology site I can get behind. It is great to have a few more rational thinkers in the mix.

A Shortage Of Power

Carl from Chicago Boyz is discussing the looming collapse of the electrical power grid in Britain and how it relates to what is happening in America.

There is a looming electricity crisis that is about to overtake the United States. While our demand for electricity continues to increase due to construction, computers (data centers take up a significant portion of electricity demand), and potentially even electric cars, essentially no new “base load” supply of electrical generation is being added to the market. We do get the occasional wind farm or solar or geothermal source of energy, and a bit of conservation is on the rise, but these tiny dents in supply and demand, respectively, don’t even begin to cover growth much less the fact that many electricity plants are aging and will face retirement in the future. Due to the long lead times involved with getting a new plant on line (at LEAST 5-10 years in the case of large base load coal or nuclear plants, best case), our problem is that we aren’t doing anything NOW to head off the crisis LATER, when we won’t have any options at all.

They have a nice graph showing how the grid in Britain will not be able to meet demand by around 2015. They also mention that already there are spot shortages in London.

We need to plan ahead and throw the Greenies overboard. Already they are contributing to the destruction of the rain forests, and starving the poor. Why we want to let them have so much power in the face of their almost total ignorance of anything outside their narrow interests is beyond me.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Green Criminals

I was discussing DDT in my post Global Warming Is Socialist Science and while I was doing research came across this comment at Deltoid.

In Argentina, as all other countries in South, Central and North America DDT is strictly prohibited under severe penalties by the law. So you are LYING when claiming “there is no de facto ban”. The exception is Ecuador who has never given up spraying DDT and saving human lives, alas, at the cost of valuable mosquito lives.

I have been exploring and traveling the Amazon since 1971 and I know what I am talking about. I am a field scientist not an armchair scientist in air conditioned labs.

At this moment, environmentalists are prosecuting health and agriculture officials in Córdoba, Argentina, because they discovered that a cargo of 12 tons of DDT had been stored for 30 years without telling the people it was stored there and “could” have contaminated the neighbors.

Could, may, might, perhaps, are words always accompanying green and fake alarms. Then, why has not mosquitoes developed resistance in Ecuador after 32 years of Ecuador refusing to give up DDT spraying, and 53 years since they started using it? You should provide a scientific answer.

Our Argentinean Foundation for a Scientific Ecology (FAEC) was consulted by the two federal judges that dealt with the DDT storage case and sent our report to be studied by the scientific team formed with members from our National University at Córdoba, and from the Ministry of Public Health. Then compared the accusations made by the environmentalists and studied their claims and references.

A remark that one of the judges said to me after their ruling was: ”These greens are not only crazy, but I would prosecute them for criminal activities if you pressed charges.”

Your weblog is perhaps the more “science-killing” and misinforming site I have ever seen. Keep up your work. It gives skeptics plenty food and ammunition to fight green neurosis and paranoia.

Eduardo Ferreyra
President of FAEC
Argentinean Foundation for a Scientific Ecology

WOW. Just WOW.

The Tragedy Of The Commons

The Tragedy of the Commons (Garrett Hardin) is that when no one owns a resource the maintenance of that resource is an externality instead of a source of future profits.

Inspired by this article and comments at The Reference Frame.

Bio Fuels - Starve The Poor So The Rich Can Feel Good

Bio Fuels may be good for corn growers, but they are bad for corn eaters.

Policymakers and legislators often fail to consider the law of unintended consequences. The latest example is their attempt to reduce the United States' dependence on imported oil by shifting a big share of the nation's largest crop – corn – to the production of ethanol for fueling automobiles.

Good goal, bad policy. In fact, ethanol will do little to reduce the large percentage of our fuel that is imported (more than 60 percent), and the ethanol policy will have ripple effects on other markets. Corn farmers and ethanol refiners are ecstatic about the ethanol boom and are enjoying the windfall of artificially enhanced demand. But it will be an expensive and dangerous experiment for the rest of us.

Which is always a danger when you use command and control methods (government) to solve what is essentially a market problem. Balance is lost.

Markets are organic. Command and control is like adding fertilizer to the soil. The right amount can help. Too much and the plant dies.

On Capitol Hill, the Senate is debating legislation that would further expand corn ethanol production. A 2005 law already mandates production of 7.5 billion gallons by 2012, about 5 percent of the projected gasoline use at that time. These biofuel goals are propped up by a generous federal subsidy of 51 cents a gallon for blending ethanol into gasoline and a tariff of 54 cents a gallon on most imported ethanol to help keep out cheap imports from Brazil.

President Bush has set a target of replacing 15 percent of domestic gasoline use with biofuels (ethanol and biodiesel) during the next 10 years, which would require almost a fivefold increase in mandatory biofuel use, to about 35 billion gallons. With current technology, almost all of this biofuel would have to come from corn because there is no feasible alternative. However, achieving the 15 percent goal would require the entire current US corn crop, which represents a whopping 40 percent of the world's corn supply. This would do more than create mere market distortions; the irresistible pressure to divert corn from food to fuel would create unprecedented turmoil.

How about that! It amounts to taking better than 35% of the world's corn supply out of the human food chain.

Thus, it is no surprise that the price of corn has doubled in the past year – from $2 to $4 a bushel. We are already seeing upward pressure on food prices as the demand for ethanol boosts the demand for corn. Until the recent ethanol boom, more than 60 percent of the annual US corn harvest was fed domestically to cattle, hogs, and chickens or used in food or beverages. Thousands of food items contain corn or corn byproducts. In Mexico, where corn is a staple food, the price of tortillas has skyrocketed because US corn has been diverted to ethanol production.

Mexicans are going hungry so American Greens can feel good about their oil consumption. I wonder what effect that will have on our illegal immigration problem? We all want to help the environment. The moral question is: should we make the poor of the world suffer so greenies can feel good?

What we need is some alternative crop such as switch grass or even trees that will not take crops out of production. The problem with such non food crops is that at the present time there is no good way to convert cellulose to ethanol. There are micro-organisms that scientist are working on to make the process economically viable. We are not there yet. In the mean time what should be done?

American legislators and policy­makers seem oblivious to the scientific and economic realities of ethanol production. Brazil and other major sugar cane-producing nations enjoy significant advantages over the US in producing ethanol, including ample agricultural land, warm climates amenable to vast plantations, and on-site distilleries that can process cane immediately after harvest.

Thus, in the absence of cost-effective, domestically available sources for producing ethanol, rather than using corn, it would make far more sense to import ethanol from Brazil and other countries that can produce it efficiently.

However there is a domestic tariff of 54¢ a gallon on imported ethanol to prop up American corn prices and corn producers. What we are seeing is what happens when governments interfere with the organic adaptations that markets provide. If we are going to mandate ethanol fuels we should at least allow all suppliers into the market on an equal footing. Then the low cost producer wins the day, rather than the most politically connected producer.

Oh, well.

We see this so often. When two government agents get together you can figure the intelligence of their proposal by subtracting the IQ of the less smart from the IQ of the most smart. Once you get three or more of them together you are in negative territory. We have 535 Congress critters in America. It is not hard to figure out the intelligence behind any proposals or laws coming from that body. Just do the math.

H/T Instapundit

Have You Heard The Crack About Sheryl Crow?

She wants us all to cut back on toilet paper. One square per visit to the loo.

"I propose a limitation be put on how many squares of toilet paper can be used in any one sitting."

Eric at Classical Values has a round up and a vintage R. Crumb cartoon about anal hygine. Hilarious. And deep.

I used to think Sheryl was hot (despite our political differences). Now I'd be afraid of touching her with a ten foot pole. Or coming within smelling distance.

I suppose you could win her heart by telling her she didn't smell anything like you expected. Romance. It just isn't what it used to be.

Cross Posted at The Astute Bloggers