EUROPE & AMERICA: ENVIRONMENTAL FALLOUT - April 20, 2009

The United States is certainly one of the cleanest, more environmentally responsible nations in the world. Virtually no European country can boast cleaner waters, more pristine rural landscapes or air quality. Even Los Angeles, the butt of all environmental jokes in the United States, is cleaner than 95 percent of all major cities in the world. But the environment has been used as a means to politicize economic progress.  Environmentalist organizations, many of them the offshoot of anti-establishment, radical movements of the 1960’s, have grown to wear a suit and tie but still show a stark aversion to any development. There is no energy project, no highway, no power plant, no harbor and no airport of which Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth or the Worldwide Wildlife Fund would approve.

Even the most outrageous ‘green’ positions have been legitimized, as being “socially responsible”. Environmentalism has provided the ideology for people to grab at a meaning in their life. It has become the religion of the ‘non -religious’.  As the recently deceased science writer and novelist Michael Crichton famously put it: “One of the most powerful religions in the Western world is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists.” Not surprisingly, many of the movement’s leaders come from the upper middle class elites including Hollywood stars and wives of celebrities, people that have little in common with the man in the street, but in whose name they presume to fight.

The United States has been a particular target for environmentalists for more than four decades. But environmentalism was becoming marginalized till the arrival of the apocalyptic threat alleged to be posed by global warming. Global warming alarmism handed the environmental movement and socialist ideologues, often the same individuals, an unprecedented opportunity, one that demanded a new and unquestioning ‘consensus’ of belief and committed political action.  The twin movements recognized this could hand real power and authority to the politicians of the UN and EU. After all, what higher moral action could there be than saving the planet? How can one have enough of a good thing? Save the planet while cutting down in size the most hated, most profligate and, oh so, more successful nation on earth?

KYOTO & THE EU'S 'WORLD LEAD' 

The next step was to sponsor a device of pseudo-governance which underlined who was running the great ‘end is nigh’ show, the world’s superpower or the organisations of ‘consensus’ politics.  The UN and EU leaders worked hand in hand on the Kyoto project.  And it was the EU that, by setting highly ambitious targets of 20 percent cuts in carbon emissions by 2020, subsequently proclaimed a ‘world lead’ in fighting global warming.  Even though CO2 is NOT a pollutant – it is vital for all vegetation growth, and there is no such thing as a proven scientific link between carbon emissions and rising or falling temperatures – now the EU and supporters of Kyoto could truly turn up the moral heat on the world’s greatest ‘polluter’, the US.  The US should therefore be the one to make the greatest sacrifices.  

It was perhaps the most brilliant politically and ideologically loaded masterstroke in a century. Because the United States, one of the least polluting nations in the world could now be accused as one of the largest polluters and this was directly linked with the use of energy sources, one of the most vital links to a prosperous life. Clearly implied even if not uttered is that America’s wealth and power has  not only been at the expense of the rest of the world, a common refrain of leftist ideologues for decades, but, in addition, it has put the entire physical not just human world in severe peril.

For the US to sign up to and impose the demands of Kyoto would be nothing short of economic suicide. The Bush administration and EU leaders both knew it.  And if the leftists in Europe thought they might at least have allies in the US Democratic Party they were in for a shock. In 1997, with Bill Clinton still in office, the US Senate voted unanimously to reject the Kyoto Treaty. The US Government, somewhat unreasonably in European eyes, was disinclined to sign its own economic death warrant.

If Europeans believed that the center Left of US politics was anything other than much to the Right of European socialism, they had a rude awakening.  As John Micklewait and Adrian Wooldridge of The Economist point out in The Right Nation: Why America is Different, “The Democratic agenda is still downright conservative compared with any of their peers outside America.”  But the moral assault on America’s climate credentials wasn’t just about carbon emissions; it was always twin-track.

THE RENEWABLE ENERGY REVOLUTION

Next to the security of the planet, nothing is as vital to the developed world as energy security. Always high on the environmental hit list is that which powers modern Western lifestyles:  hydrocarbons or fossil fuels and the technology which ‘fails to conserve’ the ‘pristine earth’ by digging them up and shipping them.  Combining the ‘end is nigh’ message of climate fear with the ‘oil is about to run out’ message of early peak oil theorists (it isn’t, by the way) has given the enviro-leftist agenda a second line of attack on America and its energy expertise: the renewable energy revolution. Once again, it is the blue and gold EU flag which flies over the revolutionary forces fighting the renewable cause. 

Now let’s be clear before we go any further. Nobody is really against research into new energy technologies, or demurs from the ‘small-scale’ value of renewable energy  sources from wind power (it may help keep your out-house lit) to solar power (might give you hot bathwater) to geothermal use (maybe, but only in really cold countries). But there is neither the technology nor any realistic hope of achieving it that will see renewable energy sources replacing hydrocarbons for decades to come, if ever.

The fact is, the renewable energy revolution is yet another, ideologically-driven, non-starter. Indeed, we would not even be talking about its possibility if it were not for the fact that the tiny impact of renewables on current world energy supplies (about 1 percent of world energy from that source by 2050) were not being funded by governments pouring billions in taxpayer funds into highly uneconomic wind and other renewable projects.  As we have written before, it is wind power that is the flagship and great green hope for the renewable revolution. Yet it is a wholly inefficient, unreliable and an extremely high maintenance ‘alternative’ that still requires the extra cost of hydrocarbon fuelled back-up facilities.  

Only a less than democratic European Union – as we will see shortly – has the financial clout to sanction pouring vast quantities of public funds into an energy industry so high on investment, so appallingly low in return.  Only a socialist system could ‘enforce’ such a revolution. No free society of entrepreneurial capitalists would do such a thing, nor want to. Hence America’s piecemeal approach to renewable energy projects and the distinct lack of private equity investment in the industry in America, where the federal government is more democratically answerable when it comes to investing public money. Private equity investors, it seems, have a nasty aversion to backing sure-fire losers. Lack of US federal investment in renewable energy projects, along with US refusal to sign up to its Kyoto carbon war, has given Europe a twin-track ‘world lead’ which it has lauded over the United States. Surprising then that it is the US, not Europe, which is achieving the greater results in lowering carbon emissions and whose private industry is making serious in-roads into energy alternatives that actually work.   That has to be a little annoying for Brussels. 

A CLIMATE OF CHANGE?

A decade on from Kyoto the science ‘consensus’ is in tatters, with hundreds of climate scientists signing up to the Manhattan Declaration and thousands of others questioning the UN IPCC climate alarmist position. On top of that 2008 proved to be the coldest year for a decade. Yet CO2 emissions continued to rise.  But how could that be when CO2 is supposed to push temperatures up?  Sea ice mass also expanded greatly during 2008. So much then for the much-touted consensus that asserts a man-made origin for the latest warming period. Again, a warning from science writer Crichton resonates, “There is no such thing as science consensus. The greatest scientists in the world are great precisely because they broke the consensus.”

The EU’s ‘world lead’ in fighting climate change now turns out to have been nothing more than the ‘sleight of hand’ of political rhetoric. The EU’s own member states, European industry and a highly corrupt carbon trading scheme have all combined to render Europe’s climate targets unachievable and the Kyoto agreement worthless. To the chagrin of EU leaders the fact is that it was the ‘unilateralist’ United States that called it right when it vetoed an unachievable Kyoto Treaty. A treaty primarily aimed at humiliating and lessening the influence of the United States.

The UN-EU inspired bid to clip the wings of the American eagle by harnessing fears over ‘the greatest threat mankind faces’ has failed.  But we have yet to see whether President Obama will belatedly fulfil European hopes and enrol the US in the pointless war on carbon and climate change.  More generally, will an Obama administration practice the ‘consensus’ political style he has promised?  But two things Obama should know. It was Euro-style consensus politics that gave the world the lately deceased Kyoto Protocol.  And consensus politics is dominated by a philosophy inherently alien and, ultimately, suffocating to the American spirit of liberty and free enterprise. 

Michael J. Economides and Peter C. Glover

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Michael J. Economides is a professor at the University of Houston, author of "The Color of Oil", editor-in-chief at Energy Tribune and a regular political and energy analyst for the U.S. media. 

Peter C. Glover is a British writer specializing in political, energy and climate issues. He is European Associate Editor at Energy Tribune and author of "The Politics of Faith: Essays on the morality of key current affairs."

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