DEATH BY REGULATORY ASPHYXIATION
The Bogus Environmental Case against Fossil Fuels
Environmental conditions in the United States have dramatically improved over the past thirty years, and the transition to concentrated fossil fuels from wood and other sources of energy from living nature is part of the reason. Yet the Environmental Protection Agency would have you believe that we face a planetary disaster unless its unprecedented “anti-carbon” agenda is implemented. In fact, the United States has reduced the carbon intensity of the economy without mandates because of highly efficient industrial processes.1 Still dependent on fossil fuels for 80 percent of energy consumed, the United States is actually reducing emissions of carbon dioxide more successfully than many countries that have imposed carbon reduction mandates.2 In March 2016, the EIA announced that energy-related emissions of carbon dioxide had decreased 12 percent from 2007–2015, and 2015’s emissions were the lowest level since 1994.3
Nevertheless, the EPA is grossly misleading the public about carbon dioxide emissions and about genuine threats to the environment and human health. Americans deserve the truth from their government about risks to their health, but under the Obama administration the EPA has become a mouthpiece for ideological propaganda.
Consider the following two propositions:
One of the largest public policy success stories in the past 50 years is the dramatic improvement of our nation’s air quality.4
We are at the point in many areas of this country when on a hot summer day, the best advice is don’t go outside. Don’t breathe the air. It might kill you.5
Mountains of data from thousands of air-quality monitors across the country confirm the first statement, from the Almanac of American Environmental Trends, and refute the second, from the Environmental Protection Agency. Between 1990 and 2010, EPA’s own data show a 59 percent reduction in total emissions from the six major pollutants regulated under federal law. Improved air quality should be considered a major public policy success story, as shown in Figure 10.1.
FIGURE 10.1
Comparison of Crime Rate, Welfare, and Air Pollution, 1970–2007
Source: Steve Heyward, 2011 Almanac of Environmental Trends (Apr, 2011); FBI Uniform Crime Reports, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, EPA.
It may be punishable heresy to the dogmatic warmists, but fossil fuels in general and human-induced carbon emissions in particular have improved human health, ecological vigor, and the biological diversity of the natural world.
Mankind’s Carbon Footprint Shrinks Mankind’s Physical Footprint
Fossil fuels, whose density and efficiency far exceed those of renewable energy fuels, have reduced the size of man’s footprint on the earth, while technology has greatly reduced polluting emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels. Our greatest encroachments on the natural world have always accompanied our pursuit of food, fuel, and raw materials—clearing land for crops and pasture, harvesting wood for fuel and building material, mining minerals and the expansion of urban and industrial facilities.6 The high concentration of energy in fossil fuels has limited man’s interference with the surface of the earth. Renewable energy systems based on wind, solar, and biomass, requiring huge tracts of lands and massive amounts of material, reverse this trend.7
This powerful benefit of fossil fuels has been entirely ignored over the past four decades. “Carbon footprint,” vaguely defined and variously used, refers to the amount of fossil fuel energy consumed per person. Invoked on food containers, clothing labels, and a host of consumer products, this catchphrase is deceptive. Burning petroleum in your car uses less energy, encumbers less land, and emits less carbon dioxide than burning a biofuel like corn ethanol.8 Although a likely candidate for the most politically incorrect statement of the year, we submit that man’s carbon footprint shrinks his physical footprint on the earth.
Replacing fossil fuel–based electric generation with wind and solar generation would require massive amounts of land and the destruction of natural habitats in return for less energy efficiency. On average, one megawatt of the installed capacity of onshore wind delivers less than a third of the electricity of one megawatt of natural gas, coal, or nuclear. So if you need one hundred megawatts from wind, you need three hundred megawatts of installed wind capacity. Green power on a large scale requires building more and more power plants. It also requires reliable fossil-fueled backup generation when wind and solar generation wobble—a necessity to keep the grid stable. Wind and sunshine may be free, but the many indirect costs of concentrating the diffuse and variable flows from these energy sources drives the cost per unit of electricity far higher than fossil fuel generation. Without generous subsidies, renewables literally can’t keep the lights on.
The so-called green energy revolution requires encroaching on more and more land and using more and more material. Upon a closer look, green energy is not really clean at all. According to Jess Ausubel, an average wind system uses 460 metric tons of steel and 870 cubic meters of concrete per megawatt. In contrast, a natural gas combined cycle plant uses about three metric tons of steel and twenty-seven cubic meters of concrete.9
As we saw earlier, Germany’s energy transformation is now requiring construction of ten new coal plants just to keep the electric grid, now overwhelmed with variable wind power, from meltdown.10 And green transportation fuels, like corn ethanol and soybean biodiesel, lay claim to fertile cropland needed to feed the world’s population. If the biofuel mandates persist, millions of acres of additional land will have to be cleared and planted with crops to meet basic global food demand.11
Since the late 1960s, the environmental Left has vilified fossil fuels for their potentially harmful—but reversible—effects on air and water quality. Recall that global cropland would have to increase by 150 percent without fertilizers and other carbon-rich contributions.12 One and half billion hectares of the surface of the earth is now devoted to cropland. Without the productivity achieved through fertilizers derived from natural gas, pesticides, and other modern agricultural machinery dependent on fossil fuels, the amount of land devoted to cropland would be as much as 3.8 billion hectares—enlarging the human footprint almost three-fold.13
Consider how the internal combustion engine that powers our vehicles shrank man’s energy footprint. Horsepower of the oats-eating, four-hooved variety was a large part of the energy mix in the United States and Europe well into the twentieth century. Replacing that animal power with fossil fuel–driven mechanical power conferred tremendous environmental benefits of the most palpable kind. Mechanized transport in urban areas cleaned the streets and improved sanitation. Horses used to compete with human beings for food energy. It took lots of oats, hay, and pasture land to feed millions of horses. Almost 30 percent of the U.S. crop harvest in 1910 was devoted to feeding 27.5 million horses.14 Had animal power not been replaced by fossil fuels, the amount of cropland necessary to feed a population now more than three times larger than in 1910 would have required massive land clearing.
Wind, solar, and biofuel systems use thousands of more acres of land than coal, natural gas, or nuclear power plants. In spite of billions of dollars in federal subsidies over several years, solar installations generate a mere two-tenths of 1 percent of America’s electric power.15 For solar to meet total U.S. electric demand, ten thousand square miles would have to be given over to solar panels.16 Ivanpah, which occupies seven times more land than the average coal plant yet will generate less than one-fourth the electric power, is a good example of the spectacular inefficiency of solar power.
Consider these numbers. In 2010 fossil fuels accounted for 13,600 gigawatts of primary energy while renewables accounted for 130 gigawatts of energy. In other words, renewables contributed only 0.9 percent of commercial energy but claimed at least three hundred thousand square kilometers of land. The entire fossil fuel system (extraction, processing, transport, electric generation and transmission of electricity) claimed only eighty to ninety thousand square kilometers.17 Forget wind and solar and consider biofuels alone. In 2010, ethanol made from corn or sugar cane amounted to only 1.5 percent of global crude oil production but occupied 260,000 square kilometers of land, accounting for more than 2 percent of our fertile farmland. Recall the contrast in power densities that we explained in Chapter 4: fossil fuels have a power density of 150 170 W/m2 while renewables have a power density of 0.05 percent W/m2. There are many different ways to calculate the physical footprint of a power plant, and it is easy to make the mistake of comparing apples with oranges, but however you measure it, wind, solar power, and biofuels require far more land than fossil fuel energy systems.
Wind and solar farms also destroy wildlife habitats and kill birds, including endangered species. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, charged with protecting these threatened birds, appears to look the other way when it comes to wind and solar farms. Wind turbines kill between two hundred thousand and four hundred thousand birds each year in the United States.18 A single wind farm in California, at Altamont Pass, kills approximately nine thousand birds every year, including fifty-five to ninety-four golden eagles.19
Fossil fuels have been particularly kind to trees, the dominant source of heat energy until the Industrial Revolution. Growing the timber needed to replace the coal burned in England in 1850 would have required 150 percent of England’s land mass.20
The current green energy plans, like Germany’s, Britain’s, and EPA’s, assume that renewable energy will be able to displace carbon dioxide emissions by over 80 percent before 2050, yet actual implementation of these plans reveals how little electric power is gained from even the largest wind and solar installations. Wind and solar promoters still claim that a given wind farm will power, for example, 150,000 homes. They talking about “name plate capacity” or “installed capacity,” however, a measure of how much electric power the facility could generate if running at maximum-engineered capacity. But wind is inherently intermittent and will never generate electricity around the clock.
The important number is the “capacity factor” (also known as “load factor”). The national average capacity factor for onshore wind generation is approximately 20 to 30 percent of the nameplate capacity. That figure, actually, is quite optimistic, with little historical data to back it up. Although clear data about the actual performance of wind and solar generating farms are scant, grid operators see capacity factors as low as 10 percent in Britain and Germany. After pouring enormous amounts of money into these projects and seeing electric prices soar, officials are reluctant to admit that wind and solar generating facilities are compromising the reliability of the power system. Not long after England narrowly avoided rolling black outs in early November 2015, the secretary of state for energy and climate change, Amber Rudd, gave a speech emphasizing that Britain could no longer pursue renewable energy “at any cost” and that “energy security must be the number one priority.”21 The operators of the Texas electric grid have long rated the capacity factor of their wind generators at only 8 to 12 percent, because the wind rarely blows during the long summers’ peak demand.22 Without much historical data about the actual performance of wind installations, the estimates of capacity factor remain murky.
Nevertheless, it is unquestionable, as Google’s green engineers found out, that assembling the land, hardware, and infrastructure required for heavy reliance on wind and solar power “would be [a construction project] like nothing ever attempted by the human race.”23 Such an insight has apparently convinced Bill Gates to shift from investments in new renewable power plants under existing technologies to investments in breakthrough research on storage technologies and other energy alternatives.24 And it appears that Google has ceased financing the Ivanpah solar plant for similar reasons.25
A “Regulatory Spree Unprecedented in U.S. History”26
Any discussion of energy and the environment sooner or later comes around to the Environmental Protection Agency, established by President Nixon’s executive order in 1970 to protect human health and the environment, now one of the most powerful, unrestrained, and politicized agencies of the federal government. Circumventing Congress, the EPA recently issued the most far-reaching regulation of its forty-five year history. Adopted in the fall of 2015, this rule—dubbed the “Clean Power Plan”—grossly exceeds the regulatory authority that Congress delegated to EPA in law. Look no further than Europe for the likely outcome of EPA’s grand plan. This rule would put our country on the path that Germany chose with its Energiewende, a path that has led to retail electric rates three times the average rate in the U.S.
A hefty majority of the American people regularly rates “clean air” and “clean water” as high priorities—a view we share. For most of its first forty years, the EPA promulgated regulations in a relatively incremental manner, balancing environmental goals, practicability, and economic growth. After decades of improvement, our air is healthier than it has ever been.27
For some time, however, the EPA has pursued an environmental agenda that is more radical than most citizens realize, contemptuous of the engineering reality, economic effects, sound science, and human concerns that stand in its way. EPA’s convoluted and stringent rules are now forcing businesses to operate like bureaucracies.
Compliance with regulatory dictates increasingly drives business priorities rather than innovation and profitability in a competitive market place. Under President Obama, any remaining restraints on the agency disappeared, and a newly aggressive EPA began issuing edicts unprecedented in number, scope, stringency, and cost. A torrent of major rules and national standards has overwhelmed the nation’s businesses, provoking knowledgeable observers to warn of a regulatory “avalanche” or “train wreck.” The American people have choked the federal courts trying to defend themselves from these rules, many of them of negligible benefit to public health and unsupported by credible science. The National Academy of Science and some of EPA’s own scientific advisory panels have sharply criticized the weak and manipulated science behind much of the Obama-era regulation.28
The Clean Power Plan imposes on the entire country a policy to eliminate the use of fossil fuels, a radical energy policy that Congress has repeatedly rejected. Banning coal-fired power plants and shutting down coal mines are the plan’s first objectives. Massive construction of new renewable facilities over millions of acres of now open space is assumed.29 Mandates for biofuels to replace petroleum are well underway, and regulation of methane—the predominant component of natural gas—is in the pipeline. Annual compliance costs of tens of billions of dollars and the prospect of losing at least 10 percent of the nation’s electric generating capacity in the near future reveal the extraordinary hubris behind the Clean Air Plan.30
The plan is intended to achieve a reduction of carbon dioxide emissions from the electric sector of 32 percent. When this percentage is plugged into the IPCC’s models, the rule would reduce predicted warming by 0.02 degree Celsius—an amount that is so minute that it is meaningless. EPA even acknowledges that the rule has no measurable climate benefits and so has offered four alternative grounds to justify destroying the electric power system of the United States.31 When questioned by Congress, the EPA administrator, Gina McCarthy, admitted that the Clean Power Plan is not about pollution control but is “an investment opportunity for renewables”—and for yet more subsidies, we would add. In other settings she has asserted that the plan would prevent thousands of early deaths and increase “climate justice for communities of color.” Her most repeated rationale for the Clean Power Plan is that it is a powerful symbol to help President Obama “lead the world” to a global climate agreement, as he believes he did in Paris in 2015.
To justify on such irrelevant grounds a rule that would, without statutory authority, dismember at colossal cost and waste the highly intricate electrical system of our country is a chilling affront to the rule of law. Shame on Congress as well for allowing the EPA to usurp this law-making authority from the legislative branch.
Carbon Dioxide Is Not a Pollutant
Labeling carbon dioxide a pollutant is one of the climate change lobby’s more absurd gestures. President Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry, and the president’s scientific advisor John Holdren repeatedly demonize carbon dioxide and carbon as pollutants or “fearsome weapons of mass destruction.” In fact, carbon dioxide is a plant nutrient essential for all human, animal, and plant life. Our bodies and blood are made of carbon. How do our national leaders square their public declarations about carbon dioxide with fundamental scientific facts?
Carbon dioxide is an odorless, invisible, harmless, and completely natural gas lacking any characteristic of a pollutant. It does not contaminate or defile as pollutants do. Carbon dioxide in the air we breathe has no adverse health effects, in contrast to carbon monoxide and high concentrations of the genuine pollutants listed in the Clean Air Act, the source of the EPA’s authority to regulate air pollutants.
With good reason, EPA has set no health-based limits on the ambient concentration of carbon dioxide. There are in fact no adverse health effects from current carbon dioxide levels of approximately four hundred parts per million. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration does set some advisory levels for prolonged exposure to carbon dioxide in a tightly enclosed space, but they are set at five thousand ppm—more than ten times the current level to which human beings are exposed.32 The Princeton physicist Will Happer noted in congressional testimony, “We try to keep CO2 levels in our U.S. Navy submarines no higher than 8,000 parts per million, about 20 times current atmospheric levels. Few adverse effects are observed at even higher levels.”33
The White House claims that reducing carbon dioxide will prevent premature death and disease is a sleight of hand that conflates reducing carbon dioxide with reducing genuine pollution such as high levels of ozone or sulfur dioxide.34
Since uncontrolled combustion of fossil fuels releases real pollutants, EPA has decided that eliminating fossil fuels—rather than decreasing their emissions—is necessary to protect health and advance its climate agenda. Such sweeping authority is far beyond what Congress delegated to EPA in law. What EPA now calls “carbon pollution” apparently includes not only carbon dioxide but also the genuine pollutants listed in the Clean Air Act, heavily regulated for forty years under highly precautionary standards. Burning fossil fuels, without emission controls, certainly emits multiple pollutants, but current technology achieves a massive reduction of those pollutants.
On the basis of this tangled logic, EPA also contends that reducing carbon dioxide will reduce asthma.35 This is impossible. Carbon dioxide is harmless to human health.36 And recall that asthma rates have risen over the same time period that air pollution has taken a nosedive. Yet EPA is determined to expand this already broad authority far beyond what the law allows to assert federal control over the sources, generation and consumption of energy.
If EPA can control carbon dioxide, EPA can control everything from large industries to individual behavior. And not surprisingly, prevalent climate policies to reduce carbon dioxide all assume heavily centralized control of the production and consumption of energy.
EPA’s Pretense of Science
The EPA has gone a long way toward making Al Gore’s dream of treating the environment as “the organizing principle of society” a reality. We would wager that a majority of Americans, with us, think improving human well-being is the better principle!37
Under President Obama, the agency invented a huge pool of new health risks to justify far more stringent regulation of a long list of “pollutants” already regulated over the past forty years.38 At the heart of this initiative is the pollutant known as fine particulate matter 2.5 microns in diameter (PM 2.5)—about one-twentieth the width of a human hair. You know it as dust.
The air we breathe contains a mix of natural dust and particles that result from human activities, especially farming and combustion. “Because particles are the byproduct of everything we do in an industrial society as well as natural processes like wind, erosion, forest and brush fires, they are everywhere.”39 The EPA does not distinguish between particulate matter from natural sources like dirt roads and particulate matter arising from urban and industrial sources, which may contain hazardous pollutants.
We will spare you a painfully technical analysis of EPA’s statistical magic tricks, but suffice it to say that EPA now assigns risks of “early death” to levels of PM 2.5 that approach zero. Former EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson testified to Congress, “Particulate Matter causes premature death. It doesn’t make you sick. It is directly causal to you dying sooner than you should.”40 In 2009, EPA apparently decided its job was to eliminate all risk to human life. We call it “going to zero” . . . zero risk.
EPA is “going to zero” by means of the statistical methodology known as “no safe threshold linear regression analysis.”41 In simple terms, EPA has concluded that no risk is too low to warrant more regulation, regardless of the cost of regulation or the uncertainty of the hazard. By the logic of that zero-risk tolerance policy, no one should drive a car, play a sport, or cross the street.
A more general version of such an approach is known as the absolutist precautionary principle. Applying the no-safe-threshold analysis increased the statistical risk of premature mortality from particulate matter by almost four-fold!42 EPA offers little to no toxicological or medical evidence of the alleged causal connection between PM 2.5 and death. The outdated studies on which EPA relies make small adjustments for reasons of smoking or obesity but otherwise attribute all non-accidental death to PM 2.5—an implausible assumption.
EPA propaganda might have reached its low point in 2011 when Lisa Jackson, with a straight face, told Congress, “If we could reduce particulate matter to levels that are healthy, it would have identical impacts to finding a cure for cancer.”43 A bold claim. In recent years, cancer has caused the deaths of approximately 7.6 million people worldwide. The agency sticks to its weak and outdated epidemiological studies in the face of a substantial body of toxicological and medical science soundly refuting its absurdly hyperbolic claims and has resisted congressional oversight.44
Why is EPA going to such lengths? Perhaps because its new target, carbon dioxide, has no effect on human health and is thus outside its regulatory reach under the Clean Air Act. The conventional pollutants that can harm human health have been reduced to such low levels that only contrived science can support new standards as stringent as EPA seeks—stringent enough to kill coal.
The Greatest (Environmental) Story Never Told
You wouldn’t know it from listening to the mainstream media or the green activists, but our environmental record over the past half-century is one of dramatic improvement. As John Wayne reminded us, “No one gets out of this alive.” Yet life in the United States is far longer, healthier, and safer than ever before. In highly industrialized countries like the United States, the most dangerous risks to human life from contaminated air and water have been virtually eliminated. There are occasional accidents, and always will be, but our environmental record should make us optimistic.
The sharp decline in air pollution since 1970 has coincided with rapid growth in our economy, population, energy use, and vehicle miles traveled. Although EPA regulation under the Clean Air Act played an important role in the environmental transformation, the main drivers were technological advances in emission controls and market-driven efficiencies—innovations fueled by economic growth, abundant energy, and the dynamics of the free market. Emissions began to fall in the 1960s, almost a decade before the Clean Air Act and the establishment of the EPA.
Many people still think that economic growth unavoidably leads to environmental degradation, but the improvements in America’s air quality occurred while our gross domestic product increased by 200 percent and the use of fossil fuels more than doubled. We learned to dramatically reduce the polluting emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels and had the money to absorb the cost of the environmental controls. Contrary to the pervasive pessimism, win-win solutions are indeed possible.
In the Clean Air Act, Congress directed the EPA to establish health-based standards for six named “criteria pollutants.” Consider the striking decline in the emissions and ambient levels of these pollutants shown in Figure 10.2. From 1980 to 2010, ambient levels of sulfur dioxide declined by 82 percent, airborne lead by 89 percent, carbon monoxide by 82 percent, nitrogen dioxides by 52 percent, ozone by 27 percent, and fine particulate matter (PM 2.5) by 27 percent.45
Over the past few decades, tailpipe emissions from our vehicles have been reduced more than 90 percent; while vehicles miles traveled have increased by 180 percent.46 This is an astonishing success. In the late 1960s, automobiles emitted over 75 grams of carbon monoxide per mile. New vehicles have lowered those emissions by 99.5 percent to 0.04 grams per mile driven.47
FIGURE 10.2
Air Quality Improvement, 1980–2012
Source: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Air Quality Trends” (Jan, 2011); and Steven Heyward, “2013 Air Quality Environmental Almanac Update,” Pacific Research Institute (Apr, 2013) 6-7, www.pacificresearch.org.
Reduction of the ozone-producing emissions from cars and trucks is another spectacular success. From the late 1960s to 2012, tailpipe emissions of volatile organic compounds—a key ingredient in ozone formation—have been reduced by 99 percent.48 In the region around Houston, Texas—the fourth-largest city in the United States and home to the world’s largest petro-chemical industrial complex—the number of days in a year that exceeded the federal ozone standard has fallen from a high of 73 days in 1995 to 14 days in 2012. And the overwhelming majority of the population of Houston lives in areas below the standard.
Most of the innovative emission control technologies that have cleared our skies came from private business. Without any new regulations, further improvement will continue with turnover of vehicles and equipment. As the late journalist Warren Brookes said, the “learning curve” is green. New means cleaner.49 We should now turn to localized environmental problems instead of over-regulating a handful of pollutants.
In addition to the six criteria pollutants, the Clean Air Act identifies 187 hazardous or toxic pollutants that are to be regulated.50 The EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory documents a 65 percent reduction of these pollutants since 1988. Mercury emissions in the United States have also declined by approximately 60 to 70 percent, accounting for less than 2 percent of the global deposition affecting ambient levels in the United States.51 Natural sources of mercury dwarf man-made sources. Volcanoes, sub-sea vents, geysers, and other natural sources release between nine thousand and ten thousand tons of mercury per year. Coal-fired power plants in the United States annually emit less than thirty tons mercury, while Chinese plants annually emit approximately four hundred tons.
The Centers for Disease Control monitors mercury exposure in women of child-bearing age and young children. At certain levels, mercury can retard brain development in babies in utero and children. CDC’s most recent study shows that average blood mercury levels have decreased to levels well below EPA’s extremely precautionary limit—a standard of risk at least two times lower than the World Health Organization’s and U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s.52 Nonetheless, in 2011 the EPA issued a rule to reduce the remaining emissions of mercury from power plants by 91 percent on a short timetable. With an annual compliance cost of $10 billion, this mercury rule is the most costly regulation in EPA’s history, but the benefits, by the agency’s own admission, are less than negligible. The direct benefits from reducing mercury amount to 0.004 percent of claimed benefits. That means $6 million in benefits and $10 billion in costs.53
In a rare ruling questioning regulatory costs, the U.S. Supreme Court didn’t buy EPA’s shell game, remanding the rule in 2015.54 But it was too late for the coal industry. The mercury rule had already led to the closure of 411 coal-fired electric generating units.55 A recent study by McKinsey and Company concludes that the coal industry is bankrupt, without the $45 billion to fund liabilities for debt, employee pensions, and mining reclamation.56 Since 2012, twenty-seven coal mining companies have filed for bankruptcy protection. Production of coal in West Virginia fell by forty-five percent from 2011 to 2015. From 2009 through 2015, over three hundred coal mines in West Virginia were shuttered at a cost of 9,733 jobs.57
Coal production and coal-fired electric generation face an existential regulatory threat, only because EPA decided to impose carbon standards infeasible for coal. Instead of relying on specious predictions of warming temperatures a century from now, EPA might consider the human cost not of carbon emissions but of low-carbon policies.
Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) Technology
A technology called carbon capture and storage (or sequestration) has long bounced around as the ultimate solution to rising levels of man-made carbon dioxide. Engineers had the idea that carbon dioxide released in the combustion of fossil fuels could be captured and permanently stored underground. While theoretically possible, CCS remains infeasible in commercial operations at scale, and the cost is exorbitant.
The federal government has devoted billions of dollars of taxpayer money to pilot CCS projects, almost all of which have been abandoned because of spiraling costs and technological dead ends. In February 2015, President Obama pulled the plug on Future Gen 2.0, a second iteration of an earlier project abandoned for the same reasons.58
An unresolved obstacle to carbon capture is what electric engineers call “parasitic load.” Current technology for capturing carbon dioxide consumes 30 to 60 percent of the electricity that the power plant was designed to generate. So much electricity is consumed in the process of generating electricity that there is little to sell.
This is yet another example of green policy mechanisms that are net energy losers. The economic productivity that began in the Industrial Revolution and accelerated in the twentieth century was fueled by achieving more output per unit of energy input. CCS, like ethanol, wind, and solar, reversed that ratio.
The single remaining pilot CCS project, in Mississippi, is estimated to cost $6.6 billion.59 American Electric Power’s comparable new coal plant in Arkansas incorporates state-of-the-art emission controls for genuine pollutants that matter to human health, but the plant will not try to capture carbon dioxide. The efficiency of this plant keeps its emissions of carbon dioxide 25 percent lower than that those of older coal plants. The cost of construction of the AEP plant is $3 billion.
Why is good news on the environmental front not recognized as important? New coal plants emit 90 percent less sulfur dioxide than plants built in the 1940s.60 Since 1973, coal-fired electric generation in the United States has increased by 123 percent, while emissions of particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen oxides have decreased by 90 percent per unit of electricity.61 The adverse environmental effects associated with fossil fuels can be reversed and have already been arrested. While our government is orchestrating a regulatory campaign to kill coal, China, India, and other developing countries are building many coal-fired power plants. Not long after the British government announced plans to close all coal plants by 2023, the Times reported that 2,400 new coal plants were under construction or planned in developing countries. At the end of 2015, China and India were building 665 new coal stations, with plans to build an additional 665 plants.62
Because of EPA dictates and low natural gas prices, coal is no longer the dominant fuel for electric generation, but it remains a mainstay, reliably and affordably meeting demand around the clock Even John Kerry admitted that, given the increasing emissions in developing countries, the total elimination of U.S. emissions would have no climatic benefits. The EPA’s lawless war on coal, waged purely for symbolic value and ideological gratification, risks the reliability of our national system of electric power.
Energy policies of such national consequence must be determined by the elected representatives accountable to the people, not federal bureaucrats. If they aren’t, this country no longer operates as a constitutional democracy.
The fossil fuels themselves expedited the development of the technologies that have so dramatically reduced the pollution associated with fossil fuels, technologies that require considerable amounts of energy to operate. If energy were not abundant and affordable, use of these technologies would be limited. Additionally, the ever-increasing efficiency made possible by fossil fuel–generated prosperity has allowed businesses and consumers to absorb the steep cost of comprehensive environmental controls now used in prosperous countries.
Power plants and industries have invested hundreds of billions of dollars to reduce genuine air pollution and prevent water contamination, but EPA’s new regulation of carbon dioxide may force the closure of those very facilities. The agency is threatening our ability to absorb the high cost of protecting the environment with its extreme standards. By conjuring new health risks at implausibly low levels and exponentially higher costs, the current EPA has radically altered the equation. But, cost matters and matters to human health. Far more epidemiological studies find a stronger correlation between unemployment or low income and premature death than the microscopic correlations between health and fine particulate matter.63
The Real Green: Carbon Dioxide Enriches Plant Growth
Why capture and permanently store underground the man-made carbon dioxide emissions that already enrich plant life? Higher carbon dioxide levels increase photosynthetic productivity, tolerance of drought, and moisture retention in plants and trees. Satellite images show that the slightly higher levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide are already “greening” the earth, especially in arid regions.64
The historical geology of the earth shows that atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide have been far higher in earlier geological eras when plant life flourished.65 For some reason, the IPCC science disregards the substantial body of science in paleoclimatology (also known as historical geology). According to agronomical studies, optimum plant growth occurs at three to four times the present ambient concentration of carbon dioxide.66 Natural carbon dioxide does not operate any differently than anthropogenic carbon dioxide.
The many benefits of carbon dioxide, of course, do not diminish questions about the heat trapping, or “greenhouse,” properties of this gas. As a matter of basic physics, rising levels of carbon dioxide could increase temperatures. The extent to which the natural drivers of our climate are “sensitive” to—that is, overpowered by—anthropogenic carbon dioxide remains a key assumption of the IPCC models, but it has not been verified by facts on the ground. Observational evidence from NASA’s balloons and satellites gathered for over twenty-five years conflicts with the models’ predictions of warming temperatures. The models run much hotter than the measured observations of NASA’s satellites and balloons, the most sophisticated, objective instruments. This indicates that the earth’s climatic system is not as sensitive to man-made emissions of carbon dioxide as assumed by the IPCC. See Figure 4.6.67
How EPA Took Control of the Chemical Basis of Life: Carbon
Congress several times considered and rejected giving EPA the authority to regulate carbon dioxide. In the summer of 2009, the U.S. House passed the American Clean Energy and Security bill, a massive measure intended to reduce greenhouse gases through a dozen new regulatory programs, including an elaborate system of cap and trade. The bill failed in the Senate, but later that year, in what remains an unparalleled seizure of regulatory authority, EPA issued an “endangerment finding” that carbon dioxide is a pollutant under the Clean Air Act.68
In the six years since the endangerment finding, the country has become accustomed to EPA’s assertion of regulatory authority over carbon dioxide. The vast expansion of this agency’s coercive power is evident in its own analysis of its first regulation of carbon dioxide emissions from large industrial sources. In the proposed rule, EPA acknowledged that the number of industrial facilities under its jurisdiction would increase from around twelve thousand to six million!69 Hospitals, schools, hotels, apartment complexes, office buildings, and small business would now be subject to the EPA’s top-down, inflexible, soviet-style diktat under its grotesquely distorted interpretation of the Clean Air Act.70
An odd Supreme Court opinion in 2007 set the stage for EPA’s self-promotion from environmental regulator to free-wheeling energy master of the country. In Massachusetts v. EPA, twelve states challenged EPA for failure to regulate greenhouse gases as pollutants. A five-member majority of the Court found that carbon dioxide “fit well” within the Clean Air Act’s extremely broad definition of air pollutant. The ruling, however, did not compel the agency to regulate carbon dioxide as most media and commentators still assert. Although the majority opinion assumed pervasive opinion about man-made global warming, the Court held that EPA’s current justification for not regulating carbon dioxide was inadequate. In short, the Court told EPA to make a more robust case against regulating carbon dioxide or proceed to regulate.
The Clean Air Act defines an air pollutant as “any air pollution agent or combination of such agents, including any physical, chemical, biological, radioactive . . . substance or matter which is emitted into or otherwise enters the ambient air.”71 Interpreted in isolation, this definition could include anything in the air, including a frisbee—a point made by one of the dissenting justices.
How the U.S. Supreme Court could view carbon dioxide as a pollutant that defiles the air and overlook the life-sustaining value of carbon dioxide is hard to explain. Most insiders on both sides of the aisle agree that the heavy-handed Clean Air Act is ill suited to control this ubiquitous gas. Congress alone, with a president of similar mind, could resolve the impasse with a brief amendment to the act clarifying that the gas of life in our cosmos—carbon dioxide—is not a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. Policy as consequential to modern civilization as “decarbonizing” is surely the provenance of our elected representatives and not EPA’s employees.
Environmental Improvements: A Luxury for the Developing World
Environmental quality remains an unaffordable luxury for much of the developing world. According to the World Bank, the most polluted cities are in developing countries, not in prosperous countries consuming huge volumes of fossil fuels.72 Consider China.
On January 13, 2013, Beijing, had a monitored level of fine particulate matter of 886 micrograms per cubic meter. The U.S. standard for the same pollutant is an average annual level of twelve micrograms per cubic meter.73 This makes China’s level ninety times higher than the average level in the United States and seventy times higher than the highest ambient concentration ever measured in this country. Monitored readings at 650 U.S. sites showed that a mean ambient concentration of fine particulate matter of only ten micrograms per cubic meter.74 In the World Health Organization’s list of the world’s eighty-nine cities most polluted by sulfur dioxide, consider that Guiyang, China—the first city on the list—has sulfur dioxide levels forty-five times higher than Los Angeles—the last city on the list.75
Environmental protection has taken a back seat to rapid economic development in countries like China, where provision of basic electrical service to a huge population has been the major priority. The many pollution control technologies developed and used in the United States could transform China’s air quality as they did ours. Whether the Chinese communist government is willing to spend the billions of dollars required to achieve healthy air quality remains to be seen. China, as we have seen, is certainly not shuttering coal-fired power plants.
Affordable electricity has improved human welfare in the twentieth more than any other technology. Yet as Matt Ridley reminds us, two billion people in the world have never seen an electric switch.76 Policies now asserted by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the U.S. government limit or prohibit financing for affordable fossil fuel–fired electric generation in developing countries. This elite green perspective cruelly denies the world’s poorest families basic light, heat, and cooling, on which health and well-being depend. The greatest environmental killers in the world are cook stove smoke, contaminated water, and uncontrolled sewage. The elimination of indoor pollution, the provision of clean water, and the safe disposal of waste require treatment systems running on . . . electric power.
Less Harm from Extreme Weather
Global warming alarmists and politicized federal agencies tell us that the weather is becoming more extreme, as President Obama did in his 2013 State of the Union address: “Heat waves, droughts, wildfires, floods—all are now more frequent and more intense. We can choose to believe that Superstorm Sandy, and the most severe drought in decades, and the worst wildfires some states have ever seen were all just a freak coincidence. Or we can choose to believe in the overwhelming judgment of science—and act before it’s too late.”77 By repeating this nonsense, the president is contradicting the conclusions of the official climate science, which he insists we must accept. The IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report concludes that there is no meaningful evidence that hurricanes, tropical storms, drought, floods, or tornados are more extreme or frequent than in the past.78 Judith Curry, the former head of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech, likewise told Congress that “most types of weather extremes were worse in the 1930s and even in the 1950s than in the current climate, while the weather was overall more benign in the 1970s. This sense that extreme weather events are now more frequent and intense is symptomatic of ‘weather amnesia’ prior to 1970.”79 Yet some developing countries are demanding “climate reparations” and “climate justice” from developed countries like the United States to pay for the extreme weather damage they incurred allegedly as a result of our country’s carbon dioxide emissions.
Whatever weather may arise, human societies have become less vulnerable to destructive weather. Rapid response to natural disasters depends on fossil fuels for air cargo, diesel generators, helicopters, trucks, and bulldozers. The many lightweight but strong synthetic materials derived from fossil fuels also save lives in disasters.80 Once helpless before the weather, man can now mitigate the damage to human society from the extreme weather events that are inevitable. As Indur Goklany writes, “Despite much more complete reporting of such [weather] events and associated casualties, aggregate mortality declined by 93 percent since the 1920s.”81
Droughts long accounted for the greatest loss of life among weather-related disasters but no longer. In the not too distant past, prolonged drought or flooding could destroy an entire annual harvest in remote human communities or for a larger portion of the population in developing countries. “Specifically, deaths from droughts were reduced by 99.98 percent since the 1920s because thanks to fossil fuels, the food and agricultural system produced more food and improved its ability to transport and distribute this food rapidly and in large quantities.”82 Americans living in well-insulated homes are largely immune to the vagaries of weather that so dominated pre-industrial societies.
Energy Poverty and Environmental Degradation
In 2015, acute energy poverty still affected the perhaps three billion of the 7.2 billion members of the human race.83 According to the World Outlook 2011 of the International Energy Agency (IEA), 2.7 billion people depend on energy from woody sticks, wood, crop residues, and animal dung for their essential household energy needs for heat and cooking.84 Perhaps 1.3 billion persons in this group lack access to electricity, and almost two billion of them live in rural areas in Asia. Indoor household pollution from burning wood or woody residues is a major health problem in many developing countries. Without effective ventilation, burning biomass in close quarters is associated with many life-threatening diseases, including chronic bronchitis, pulmonary tuberculosis, and lung cancer. The United Nations Foundation finds that cook stove smoke kills four million people per year.85
In Fires, Fuel & the Fate of 3 Billion, Gautami Yadama chronicles the stories of families whose lives revolve around the daily search for the material to fuel their crude stoves. “In rural India, countless numbers of women and children walk for hours each day to secure fuelwood or resort to burning crop residues, charcoal, and animal dung . . . [to] keep their homes and their families alive.”86
Such an acute lack of subsistence energy damages the environment, local economies, and human health. “Energy access has become the dividing line between the haves and the have-nots,” writes Yadama, “and on one side of the line are those destined to lives of devastating poverty.”87 Access to the simplest of modern electric systems would transform these lives.
Persons relying on indoor cook stoves without basic stovepipes do indeed have a carbon pollution problem. But it is a problem of carbon monoxide, not carbon dioxide. The British government might warn the recipients of its subsidies for wood-burning stoves under the Renewable Heat Initiative of the difference between carbon monoxide—a potential killer—and carbon dioxide—the gas of life.
From “Satanic Mills” to “Green and Pleasant Land”
Charles Dickens offered a graphic description of environmental squalor in industrializing London of the mid-nineteenth century in The Old Curiosity Shop: “A long suburb of red brick houses . . . where coal-dust and factory smoke darkened the shrinking leaves, . . . and where the struggling vegetation sickened and sank under the hot breath of the kiln and furnace, making them by its presence seem yet more blighting and unwholesome than in the town itself. . . . [T]hey came by slow degrees upon a cheerless region, where not a blade of grass was seen to grow; where not a bud put forth its promise in the spring; where nothing green could live but on the surface of the stagnant pools. . . .”88
Whether this scene is amplified by poetic license or is an accurate description of extreme environmental degradation, such conditions are rare to nonexistent in mature industrialized democracies today.
Economic growth, technological change and high energy consumption are distinguishing characteristics of industrialization. Many powerful Malthusian voices still maintain that growth, technology, and hydrocarbon energy are inimical to environmental quality and will inexorably lead to some planetary catastrophe. The recent encyclical on the environment by Pope Francis represents an especially doctrinaire version of such pessimism, asserting that modern industrialization has so mistreated the environment that the earth is now “an immense pile of filth.”89 That is more likely to be the case if wind and solar facilities are built on millions of acres across our countryside.
There is no doubt that environmental degradation occurred during the first stages of the transition from low-growth agrarian economies to industrialized economies as occurs now in China. History also shows that prosperity and continued technological innovation eventually reversed the environmental deterioration. And this is especially the case in democratic nations with market-based economies and personal freedom. Countries that structurally enshrine economic liberty under the rule of clear and limited laws also achieve environmental quality.90
China and India now offer the most glaring example of rapidly industrializing countries with high levels of real air pollution. The governments of these countries now express commitment to reducing pollution, and they have the advantage of adopting established technologies. Time will tell whether authoritarian regimes will be willing to marshal the innovation, finance, and commitment to societal welfare necessary for substantial environmental improvements.
Democratic societies, legally obliged to protect the health and welfare of every citizen, have engendered environmental sensitivity throughout private businesses. Most Western nations have enacted complex and enforceable laws to protect air and water quality. Russia, however, is a different story, appearing to be far more devoted to enlarging its military than improving air and water quality for the Russian people. Sale of oil and natural gas accounted for over 50 percent of Russia’s budget revenue and 68 percent of total exports in 2013.91
Countries that nationalize major industries and denied basic human rights in liberty and property rarely put a premium on environmental protection needed to protect human health. The environmental contrasts between Pyongyang and Seoul—the capitals of North and South Korea respectively—are telling. The same stark contrast can be seen on the international border between El Paso, Texas, and Juarez, Mexico. Prosperity is not the enemy of genuine environmental quality. Prosperity and abundant energy make continual improvements in environmental quality possible.