The Beauty Of Laissez Faire — And How It Explodes Climate-Change Scaremongering



It was just recently announced that a team of Harvard scientists, in collaboration with a private company called Carbon Engineering, have developed an inexpensive, large-scale method for pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

In an excellent article titled Climate Change Can Be Stopped by Turning Air Into Gasoline, Robinson Meyer, of the left-leaning Atlantic magazine, correctly notes that this innovation could well “transform how humanity thinks about the problem of climate change.”

First, it should probably be noted again that climate by definition changes, and that the very term climate change is for this reason a misnomer and also, I believe, a deliberate obfuscation.

Second, Robinson Meyer’s point is entirely true — and, though he doesn’t quite realize it, it’s a perfect illustration of the power and the beauty of laissez faire.

As many have been saying for decades: the innovation and prosperity that freedom fosters — not government-coerced behavior-modification or autocratic laws and more and ever-more mushrooming bureaucratic red-tape, such as what the left and the right have been proposing for decades — will solve climate problems, in the same way it’s solved problems all throughout history.

This stems from the human propensity to invent, innovate and advance in efficiency and technology when we’re left to our own devices.

Humans always have done so, and humans always will do so.

Whether it’s kerosene instead of whale oil, electric energy instead of kerosene, atomic energy instead of electricity, whether it’s deuterium instead of nuclear, whether it’s hemp instead of cotton, edible spoons and straws instead of aluminum or plastic … when you allow humans to be free, which includes secure protection of person and property and the freedom to prosper and grow wealthy, humans will endlessly innovate, create, invent, produce, exchange, and innovate and create more.

It’s part of what it means to be a conceptual species: our survival is born out of our ability to reason and problem-solve — in short, to think.

If the industrial-scale de-carbonization stabilizes temperatures — and it now seems inevitable that it’ll be a big part of the solution — the Malthusian notions that dominate the modern Left will once again lose out to capitalistic innovation. This was inevitable when Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon were betting on resource scarcity, Al Gore was producing chilling Oscar-winning science-fiction films [whose ten-year predictions have proven way off], and contemporary Chicken Littles were telling us the human race was doomed.

“This opens up the real possibility that we could stabilize the climate for affordable amounts of money without changing the entire energy system or changing everyone’s behavior,” Ken Caldeira, a senior scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science, told The Atlantic.

That’s fantastic news, because, despite decades of sensational predictions and “education” on the topic, our behavior hasn’t changed.

(Link)

As left-winger Steven Pinker put it in his most recent book Enlightenment Now:

[The] idea that environmental protection is a problem to be solved, is commonly dismissed as the “faith that technology will save us.” In fact, it is a skepticism that the status quo will doom us — that knowledge and behavior will remain frozen in their current state for perpetuity. Indeed, a naive faith in stasis has repeatedly led to prophecies of environmental doomsdays that never happened.

Truer words were never spoken, and I sometimes wonder when we’ll ever get an apology for all the wild fear-mongering and scaremongering and failed predictions — things that had us petrified and sleepless on and off all throughout elementary school, as the end-of-the-world and The Rapture had us petrified in church.

Steven Pinker also notes:

The “population bomb” defused itself…. The other environmental scare from the 1960s was that the world would run out of resources. But resources just refuse to run out. The 1980s came and went without the famines that were supposed to starve tens of millions of Americans and billions of people worldwide. Then the year 1992 passed and, contrary to projections from the 1972 bestseller The Limits to Growth, the world did not exhaust its aluminum, copper, chromium, gold, nickel, tin, tungsten, or zinc. In 2013 the Atlantic ran a cover story about the fracking revolution entitled “We Will Never Run Out of Oil.” Humanity does not suck resources from the earth like a straw in a milkshake until a gurgle tells it that the container is empty. Instead, as the most easily extracted supply of a resource becomes scarcer, its price rises, encouraging people to conserve it, get at the less accessible deposits, or find cheaper and more plentiful substitutes.

The climate-change debate has hinged completely on the false notion that only vast government intrusions into energy consumption can solve it; that regulating everyone’s habits — not just wealthy people and wealthy nations, either, but also emerging countries whose poverty-stricken people benefit most from inexpensive energy, the life-blood of any and every society — this alone, it’s wrongly propounded, can prevent us from certain catastrophe.

What this notion translates to, as David Harsanyi well explains it, is this:

You could be poorer, less free, and do almost nothing to change the trajectory of warming.

We can’t have complete certitude about the future, of course, but you’re not a techno-utopian to trust that humans typically find ways to adapt. You’re not Pollyannaish to point out that, by nearly every quantifiable measure, the state of humanity has improved over the years we were busy panicking about global warming — people are safer, live longer, and are freer. They’ve cut poverty, illiteracy, infant mortality, and so on….

For many environmentalists, all this will be welcome news. I doubt it will be for the politically motivated climate warriors, whose aim has always been social engineering in the cause of curbing “capitalistic excesses.” Even if decarbonization is successful, they will demand we continue to mandate inefficient renewable energies. They will demand tax dollars be used to prop up the clean-energy industry. They will continue to demand we ban fracking. They will continue to propose creating fabricated markets that artificially spike the cost of fossil fuels to pay for supposed negative externalities…. After all, we’ve been told for a long time that the Earth was on the precipice of disaster. Every year was our very last chance to save it.

Climate change is the peg upon which the modern-day environmental movement has hung virtually everything. It is the holy grail. Without it, many (though not all) will for this reason be lost without it. Get ready for the next thing. And be very careful embracing global cooling — cold being FAR more deadly than warmth: Carbon Fuels Conquered Famine But …

To those who embrace this new technology, I salute you.

Because the most rebellious thing you can do is think for yourself.


Related: Remember when the massive California wildfires of 2017 were blamed on global warming? Never mind.


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The Great Electrifier: Nuclear Energy & the Myth of Nuclear Waste



There is no such thing as nuclear waste — and that’s just one of the many beautiful things about nuclear energy.

A nuclear reactor is refueled by its waste.

Quoting Dr. Pierre Guelfe, chief engineer of France’s main nuclear facility, in an interview he gave with William Tucker, author of an excellent book called Terrestrial Energy:

Pierre Guelfe: When the depleted fuel rods are removed, the reactors are shipped to La Hague for reprocessing. They let it cool down for a few years and then remove the uranium and plutonium. They ship the plutonium here. We take it and mix it with another stream of material, which is the scrap that is left over from uranium enrichment. The U235 content of this is very low … U235 is the fissionable isotope. But the plutonium is much more fissionable than the depleted uranium. So when we mix them together, you get a fuel that is very close to enriched uranium. It’s called ‘Mixed Oxide Fuel’(MOX). We have 20 reactors here in France running on MOX and there are ten more in Germany and two in Switzerland. So we’re pure plutonium, and we scrap uranium together. We use everything. We don’t leave any waste.

William Tucker: I’ve read this several times but I want to make absolutely sure: The plutonium that comes out of a commercial reactor, that you separate from the fuel rod, that cannot be used to make a bomb, right?

Pierre Guelfe: That’s right. You have four plutonium isotopes: Pu239, Pu240, Pu241 and Pu242. Of the four, only Pu239 can sustain a chain reaction. The others are contaminants. The PU241 is too highly radioactive. It fissiles too fast so you can’t control it to make a bomb. But you can use all of them to sustain fission in a MOX reactor (source).

And yet on the basis of some colossal misinformation, the United States now has fifty thousand tons of nuclear “waste,” because our government won’t allow nuclear plants to reuse it.

The stated policy of the Department of Energy (DOE) is “not to reprocess” a perfectly reusable by-product — and all for absolutely no good reason.

That, as I discuss in Chapter 12 of my book, is why Yucca Mountain is unnecessarily, and at great cost, being built in southwestern Nevada: to store a nuclear “waste” that could instead be simply and efficiently reused.

Nuclear “waste,” incidentally, is also used for medical isotopes. In fact, over 40 percent of medicine now is nuclear medicine. Currently, we must import all our nuclear isotopes because we’re not allowed to use any of our own.

This is not only profligate.

It’s a kind of lunacy.



Peak Oil and the Doomers’ Dire Predictions

Or perhaps it's only just begun.
Or perhaps it’s only just begun.

Remember those many years ago — circa 2005 — when Peak Oil was all the rage, and people like me were routinely ridiculed by the Church of Environmentalism for writing articles such as this one?

Well, you won’t believe it, but it looks as though some of that leftist dogma was perhaps incorrect after all.

The following excerpt comes from the Institute for Energy Research (IER), in a recent article called “Peak Oil theory may have peaked“:

Screen Shot 2015-04-20 at 11.54.01 PM

The chart above shows why Hubbert was considered such a visionary, at least for a while. After his 1956 prediction, U.S. production did indeed rise and then peak just in time for the window Hubbert had given himself. The gentle decline in U.S. production from the mid-1970s through the early 2000s was also consistent with Hubbert’s theory, which treated the total national output as an aggregation of individual wells, each with a technically defined, bell-shaped curve lifecycle of output.

Yet as the chart also shows, the nice bell shape started turning around in 2009 and took off like a rocket in 2011. Looking at monthly figures, U.S. field production of crude in December and January were the highest values since 1972, and not far behind the all-time record set in 1970. Although the sharp decline in the world price of oil since last year may halt the rapid spike in U.S. output, it is obvious from the chart that the mechanistic model of “peak oil” theory is incorrect.

“Finite” Resources Never Run Out With Enough Ingenuity

The fundamental problem with “peak oil” theory is that it adopts a Malthusian mindset, in which we view humanity as the stewards of a single pool of oil that gets smaller every time we burn a barrel.

Please read this article to find out why the “Malthusian mindset” is not just incorrect but so wildly incorrect.

Worst Power Plant Disaster?

It’s not nuclear. Quoting Annalee Newitz, at i09:

“[W]hen accidents happen, the deadliest and costliest source of energy is water — especially when it’s held back by poorly-designed dams. The Chernobyl disaster doesn’t come close to the damage done when a dam at a hydroelectric plant bursts.”

Here’s her rundown:

1975: Shimantan/Banqiao Dam Failure
Type of power: Hydroelectric
Human lives lost: 171,000
Cost: $8,700,000,000
What happened: Shimantan Dam in China’s Henan province fails and releases 15.738 billion tons of water, causing widespread flooding that destroys 18 villages and 1500 homes and induces disease epidemics and famine

1979: Morvi Dam Failure
Type of power: Hydroelectric
Human lives lost: 1500 (estimated)
Cost: $1,024,000,000
What happened: Torrential rain and unprecidented flooding caused the Machchu-2 dam, situated on the Machhu river, to burst. This sent a wall of water through the town of Morvi in the Indian State of Gujarat.

1998: Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation Jess Oil Pipeline Explosion
Type of power: Oil
Human lives lost: 1,078
Cost: $54,000,000
What happened:Petroleum pipeline ruptures and explodes, destroying two villages and hundreds of villagers scavenging gasoline.

1944: East Ohio Gas Company
Type of power: Liquified natural gas (LNG)
Human lives lost: 130
Cost: $890,000,000
What happened: Explosion at LNG facility destroys one square mile of Cleveland, OH.

1907: Monongah Coal Mine
Type of power: Coal
Human lives lost: 362
Cost: $162,000,000
What happened: Underground explosion traps workers and destroys railroad bridges leading into the mine.

Compare these to:

1986: Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant
Type of power: Nuclear
Human lives lost: 4,056 (Source for this number: United Nations Scientific Subcommittee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation)
Cost: $6,700,000,000
What happened: Mishandled reactor safety test at Chernobyl nuclear reactor causes steam explosion and meltdown, necessitating the evacuation of 300,000 people from Kiev, Ukraine and dispersing radioactive materials across Europe.

A lot of this research was based on public policy professor Andrew Sovacool’s extremely informative monograph “The Accidental Century,” which looks at power plant disasters in the twentieth century in great detail.

(Link)

Nature Spills More Oil Than Man — By Far

Screen Shot 2015-02-26 at 3.13.09 PM

A good reader sent the following:

Mighty Oil-Eating Microbes Help Clean Up The Gulf

In response to which, one should also point out what many people still don’t know: namely, that nature alone, apart from man, “spills” far more oil than all the world’s oil companies combined. For example:

Natural Oil Leaks Equal To 8–80 Exxon Valdez Spills

Oil residue in seafloor sediments that comes from natural petroleum seeps off Santa Barbara, Calif., is equivalent to between 8 to 80 Exxon Valdez oil spills, according to a new study by researchers at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB).

Oil content of sediments is highest closest to the seeps and tails off with distance, creating an oil fallout shadow. The amount of oil in the sediments down current from the seeps is the equivalent of approximately 8 to 80 Exxon Valdez oil spills, the study said.

WHOI marine chemist Chris Reddy said Chris Farwell, the lead author of a paper on the subject and at the time an undergraduate working with UCSB’s Dave Valentine, “developed and mapped out our plan for collecting sediment samples from the ocean floor. After conducting the analysis of the samples, we were able to make some spectacular findings.”

There is an oil spill everyday at Coal Oil Point (COP), the natural seeps off Santa Barbara, where 20-25 tons of oil have leaked from the seafloor each day for the last several hundred thousand years.

Earlier research by Reddy and Valentine at the site found microbes were capable of degrading a significant portion of the oil molecules as they traveled from the reservoir to the ocean bottom, and that once the oil floated to sea surface, about 10% of the molecules evaporated within minutes.

“One of the natural questions is: What happens to all of this oil?” Valentine said. “So much oil seeps up and floats on the sea surface. It’s something we’ve long wondered. We know some of it will come ashore as tar balls, but it doesn’t stick around. And then there are the massive slicks. You can see them, sometimes extending 20 miles from the seeps. But what really is the ultimate fate?”

Read the rest of the article here.

The Green Jobs Racket Exposed (Again)

Here’s an economic axiom which we’ve discussed here before, but which in this day and age is always worth repeating:

If something is economically tenable, it never ever needs to be subsidized.

The latest concretization of this fact comes from none other than the state-run Associated Press:

After a year of crippling delays, President Barack Obama’s $5 billion program to install weather-tight windows and doors has retrofitted a fraction of homes and created far fewer construction jobs than expected.

In Indiana, state-trained workers flubbed insulation jobs. In Alaska, Wyoming and the District of Columbia, the program has yet to produce a single job or retrofit one home. And in California, a state with nearly 37 million residents, the program at last count had created 84 jobs…

…”This is the beginning of the next industrial revolution with the explosion of clean energy investments,” said assistant U.S. Energy Secretary Cathy Zoi. “These are good jobs that are here to stay.”

But after a year, the stimulus program has retrofitted 30,250 homes — about 5 percent of the overall goal — and fallen well short of the 87,000 jobs that the department planned, according to the latest available figures.

As the Obama administration promotes a second home energy-savings program — a $6 billion rebate plan — some experts are asking whether that will pay off for homeowners or for the planet.

(Link)

For more on the inherently toxic nature of environmentalism, please read this.

Nuclear Waste Doesn’t Exist

There is no such thing as nuclear waste — and that’s just one of the many beautiful things about nuclear energy.

A nuclear reactor is refueled by its waste.

Quoting Dr. Pierre Guelfe, chief engineer of France’s main nuclear facility, in an interview he gave with William Tucker, author of an excellent book called Terrestrial Energy:

Pierre Guelfe: When the depleted fuel rods are removed, the reactors are shipped to La Hague for reprocessing. They let it cool down for a few years and then remove the uranium and plutonium. They ship the plutonium here. We take it and mix it with another stream of material, which is the scrap that is left over from uranium enrichment. The U235 content of this is very low … U235 is the fissionable isotope. But the plutonium is much more fissionable than the depleted uranium. So when we mix them together, you get a fuel that is very close to enriched uranium. It’s called ‘Mixed Oxide Fuel’(MOX). We have 20 reactors here in France running on MOX and there are ten more in Germany and two in Switzerland. So we’re pure plutonium, and we scrap uranium together. We use everything. We don’t leave any waste.

William Tucker: I’ve read this several times but I want to make absolutely sure: The plutonium that comes out of a commercial reactor, that you separate from the fuel rod, that cannot be used to make a bomb, right?

Pierre Guelfe: That’s right. You have four plutonium isotopes: Pu239, Pu240, Pu241 and Pu242. Of the four, only Pu239 can sustain a chain reaction. The others are contaminants. The PU241 is too highly radioactive. It fissiles too fast so you can’t control it to make a bomb. But you can use all of them to sustain fission in a MOX reactor (source).

And yet on the basis of some colossal misinformation, the United States now has fifty thousand tons of nuclear “waste,” because our government won’t allow nuclear plants to reuse it.

The stated policy of the Department of Energy (DOE) is “not to reprocess” a perfectly reusable by-product — and all for absolutely no good reason.

That, as I discuss in Chapter 12 of my book, is why Yucca Mountain is unnecessarily, and at great cost, being built in southwestern Nevada: to store a nuclear “waste” that could instead be simply and efficiently reused.

Nuclear “waste,” incidentally, is also used for medical isotopes. In fact, over 40 percent of medicine now is nuclear medicine. Currently, we must import all our nuclear isotopes because we’re not allowed to use any of our own.

This is not only profligate.

It’s a kind of lunacy.

Just for the record: Barack Obama was opposed to nuclear energy before he was for it, presumably because, unlike wind and solar, nuclear energy actually works, and is more efficient by far than any other alternative.

It seems well worth mentioning also that as a direct result of environmentalism’s pathological antipathy toward nuclear energy, these same environmentalists have thereby brought the world 400 million more tons of coals used per year, ever since 1976, when the nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island melted down. Naturally, because environmentalists can’t be bothered by facts, it went completely unnoticed that the containment vessel at Three Mile Island had done its job and prevented any significant release of radioactivity.