Another excuse for statism bites the dust

One morning last week the recycling truck came hurtling down the street. Only one family in our neighborhood, so far as I can tell, dutifully sorts their glass, plastic and other stuff into the red, white and blue bins. The trash men throw the contents of all three into the gaping maw at the back of their truck.

At least they don't lie about it: Right on the side of this behemoth, in highly visible white letters, the truck describes itself as a "Commingling Recycling Vehicle." Most of that stuff will end up in the landfill, which is fine. Under current health codes, bottlers have decided it almost always costs more to sterilize and re-use a glass beverage container than trash it; most other recycling schemes either have to be subsidized, or have been banned. (I wrote not too long ago about the guy who was shut down by California regulators after he tried to set up a business buying and recycling used frying oil as a motor fuel.)

It got me wondering how many other ways the "green" movement encourages people to do or fund things designed to make them feel good, but which turn out to be a waste of time.

Jane Orient's "Doctors for Disaster Preparedness" are usually pretty good on this topic. At www.ddponline.org we find their September "Reality Check":

Wind: no environmental benefit

"The Green religion constantly issues apocalyptic prophecies and proclaims dogma. Ice will melt, seas will rise, green is clean, and their policies will lead to health, prosperity, and the salvation of the Planet. ... But without a Memory Hole, these false prophets cannot prevail. ...

"Greens are turning against Green energy - even before it becomes economically viable," Dr. Orient's organization points out. The Western Lands Project, Basin and Range Watch, and Solar Done Right "have filed a complaint with the Bureau of Land Management, stating that the agency 'failed to analyze numerous impacts of solar energy plant development within several Solar Energy Zones.'

"The Greens are worried that the projects might disturb caliche deposits, which might release CO2 into the air, and threaten the habitat of the endangered desert tortoise, Mojave fringe-toed lizard, golden eagle, and desert bighorn (Wall Street Journal 9/4/12).

"If one is worried about trace concentrations of greenhouse gases, the solar energy industry has become one of the leading emitters of hexafluorethane (C2F6), nitrogen trifluoride (NF3), and sulfur hexafluoride (SF6), which have, respectively, a greenhouse potency 12,000, 17,000, and 23,000 times that of CO2," DDP points out.

"Wind has no environmental benefit," physicist John Droz told Doctors for Disaster Preparedness at their annual meeting this year. To build one megawatt of generating capacity requires 2,000 pounds of rare earths, Mr. Droz reported. ''A 350-megawatt project generates 350,000 pounds of radioactive waste plus a huge amount of toxic air pollution. Offshore wind installations disrupt marine habitats. While the harm to birds, particularly migratory birds, has been diminished, there is no known way to mitigate bat takings. The loss of bats would have a profound effect on agriculture, as a bat eats about 1 million insects. ..."

While the Brookings Institution claims there are more jobs in the "Clean Economy" than in fossil fuels - 2.7 million versus 2.4 million, respectively - "there are only about 24,000 jobs in each of wind power and photovoltaic solar power. The big 'green' categories are waste management, public mass transit, and organic food and farming," according to the Aug. 18 edition of the Science & Environmental Policy Project's TV show, "The Week That Was."

"The reality is that apocalyptic Green predictions are regularly shown to be wrong," conclude the folks at Doctors for Disaster Preparedness. "This doesn't matter because the real agenda is not to protect human health or to promote clean, economical energy, but to reduce human population and jettison free enterprise and individual rights in favor of a state-managed economic system."

Discredited myths, no rebuttals

Meantime, after PBS' "Frontline" broadcast its program "Climate of Doubt" on Oct. 23, promising to go "inside the organizations" that helped turn the tide of public opinion away from excessive concern over the possible threat of man-made global warming, Joseph Bast, president of The Heartland Institute, commented "We welcomed 'Frontline' producer Catherine Upin and her crew to our Seventh International Conference on Climate Change in Chicago in May," hoping the producers would be even-handed.

In the end, the "Frontline" effort "wasn't as bad as we had feared," Mr. Bast concluded, but "The quality of the program starts to deteriorate at about the 20-minute mark," when a series of "notorious global warming alarmists" are presented as representative of the mainstream scientific community, "which they are not." Host John Hockenberry "repeatedly invokes the discredited myth of a 97 percent consensus. ... The issue of what role, if any, consensus should play in science is not addressed at all."

The second half of the program also speculated on the role that corporate and philanthropic funding plays in the debate, "but it only addresses the funding of skeptics, not of alarmists," Bast points out. "No scientist interviewed for the program offered proof that any of the climatic events shown at the end of the program were caused by human activity, nor could they."

The Heartland folks provided a few helpful "facts to keep in mind" when watching such programs, including: "The best scientific data show there has been no warming for 16 years, something none of the computer models that predict an eco-catastrophe predicted or can explain. Data show no connection between man-made emissions of carbon dioxide and extreme weather events such as hurricanes, tornadoes, or floods. ... Global warming, simply put, is not a crisis."

No wonder John Coleman, a senior meteorologist at KUSI in San Diego who co-founded the Weather Channel, noted last week: "There was no mention of 'global warming' in any of the three presidential debates this year. This is the first time since 1984 that the topic has not been brought up. ... This is not good news to Al Gore or the thousands of scientists who depend on the global warming scare to trigger the federal research grants that keep them richly employed while so many Americans can't find a job of any kind. The reality that there is no significant man-made global warming seems to be more and more accepted by voters and politicians."

Vin Suprynowicz is author of the novel "The Black Arrow." See www.vinsuprynowicz. com.