Real Climate Stewardship: Reduce Flaring Oil Wells and Encourage Clean Coal Plants
Climategate has made it difficult for the average citizen to believe that governments are capable of real environmental care. Falling prey to global warming theories of a few elite climate snake-oil salesmen turned Copenhagen into “Jokenhagen.”
For example, in the mainstream media (controlled by elites who have bought up much of the independent media that used to serve as a watchdog for the truth) we see a fixation on the “problem” of CO2, a relatively harmless “greenhouse gas” which plants need to grow to make the planet green, rather than more genuine problems like sulfur emissions from coal plants, or methane releases or flares from oil wells where greed for oil money in Venezuela, Russia, and the Middle East leads to the release or burning of enough natural gas to fuel both France and Germany for a year.
Elite political “environmentalists” campaign against nuclear energy, one of the cleanest burning fuels, because it is not in their personal economic interest.
One of the main problems is that the environmental elite only find receptivity for their concerns in developed countries. Where lack of education and poverty exist, people consider regard for the environment a secondary goal. You find concern for the environment, just as you find lower birthrates, where there is greater education and a large middle class, not where there is greater government regulation and class division.
The United States and Western Europe are spending money on making energy production clean by producing clean coal burning plants, safe nuclear power, providing tax credits for geothermal heating, and allowing individuals to sell power to the infrastructure grid. They engage in recycling of paper, glass, aluminum, and plastics. They fine for litter on the roads. These things are being done by people who are increasingly educated and aware of the consequences of their own actions.
Where people are scrapping to stay alive, they will destroy the environment. In Brazil, rain-forests are being bulldozed to search for gold, and gold-prospectors use mercury in their bare hands to separate it from the earth. The result is both real environmental disaster and self-inflicted cancer from mercury exposure. In China, you find people taking and dumping toxic waste on their land for a few dollars. One new dirty coal plant without smokestack scrubbers and other clean air technology is being built each week in China to power industries moved from the developed world because labor and energy are cheaper. In Africa you find people chopping down the remaining trees on the edge of a desert for firewood. Even in the inner-city ghettos in the US and Europe, you find this lack of concern for the environment. You also see the greatest number of childbirths in these same areas of poverty and lack of education.
Further, government-run energy programs by governments not accountable to the people are generally the most destructive. During the Soviet period hundreds of millions of barrels of oil seeped into the Arctic tundra from leaks in poorly welded and cracked oil pipelines. Today, especially in countries where this is a small middle class, it is still common to release natural gas or flare oil wells. In the United States this is regulated and efforts are being made to increasingly capture this precious natural resource rather than either releasing lots of methane gas or flaring it, putting smoke into the atmosphere. Market forces push private owners of oil wells to maximize their return by selling both the natural gas and the oil. Neither bureaucratic governments, selfish dictators profiting from land that is not their own, nor large corporations striving to maximize profit on Wall Street for the next quarter are motivated to exercise such stewardship. They all have an impersonal relationship to the resource and therefore fail to behave as environmental stewards.
The Climate conference in Copenhagen was recommending measures that would punish environmental stewardship and encourage more production of energy and pollution in areas where there is less stewardship:
- A tax burden would be placed on the most environmentally friendly countries and provide money to polluters.
- A $5,000 carbon tax would be place on children born to educated families who would educate their children about pollution, but nothing would be done to improve the education of impoverished families or people on welfare. This would lead to births of a smaller percentage of the population that will take stewardship over the environment.
- Cap and Trade is a tax that puts greater energy costs on consumers rather than current energy producers, who will just pass it on in the form of increased fees. If you want to encourage more clean energy at lower costs you should create incentives for successful alternative energy producers, not handouts to alternative energy charlatans that will create a new parasitic class on society at consumer expense.
- Stopping construction of clean energy production in the US and Europe shifts industrial production and jobs to countries that will produce those same goods with greater pollution. The net result: greater pollution.
Conclusion: From what I can observe, the people behind Climategate and the Copenhagen Conference appear to be using an appeal to help the climate as a method for personal riches and bureaucratic jobs while creating incentives that will promote further environmental destruction. The incentives they propose seem to be demonic and perverse.
This article is very well-informed. It makes many undisputable points. The disposition of sulphur and methane, the fixation on CO2, the need for nuclear energy, the relationship between environmentally responsible behavior and being an educated/developed/affluent society, and more.
I am not knowledgeable enough to either agree with, or to dispute your evaluation of the Copenhagen conference, or Cap and Trade policies, which seem to make some sense to me.
Regarding the Third World, and more generally the global environmental crisis, I remain a Malthusian. In the end, it is simply the aggregate world population – and its collective level of consumption -which must be controled. For example, there are now about a billion cars on earth, including a ratio of 1 car per capita in the US and 1 car for every 2 people in Europe and in Japan. Now let’s say that in 20 years China will have one car for every 2 inhabitants too, and India, Brazil, etc. 1 per 5. This alone would double the number of cars to 2 billion, and then we go beyond that, to 3 or 4 billion. This is not sustainable. We’ll choke.
Look at Africa, too: despite AIDS, its population continues to grow FIVE times more rapidly that ours. The Malthusian checks become inevitable – war, disease and starvation. Auguste Comte said it best: Demography is Destiny.
But look: The article is fine. It is only provocative in the sense that it elicits further thought and discussion. That’s good.
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Yes, I agree