Key Environmentalist Myths about Energy Go Up in Smoke

By Andrew Follett

Saturday, April 22, 2023

 

New data confirm that several common environmentalist talking points about energy are highly misleading. The chasm between reality and eco-activist fantasy is so wide that even the Washington Post — not exactly a right-wing media outlet — has taken notice.

 

Reality has disrupted both the simplistic left-wing narrative of blue states producing clean energy while red states allegedly pollute and popular conceptions of what a “green” energy future might look like.

 

The first eco-myth shattered is the idea that wind and solar energy actually lower carbon-dioxide (CO2) emissions.

 

“Historically, the two main ways to make electricity without emitting carbon dioxide have been nuclear power plants and hydroelectric dams. Their share of U.S. electricity generation has not changed in decades,” Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Harry Stevens, in the uncharacteristic analysis for the Washington Post, concedes. “In short, most major environmental groups oppose the two technologies that have historically generated carbon-free electricity.”

 

The environmental movement’s misplaced opposition to nuclear energy and hydropower is deeply entrenched. Activists have attempted to strangle the nuclear industry by lobbying for absurd levels of overregulation. And John McPhee, whom far-left magazine Mother Jones fawningly dubbed “the godfather of nature writing,” captured the anti-hydropower zeitgeist when he claimed that in the innermost circle of an environmentalist’s “absolute epicenter of Hell . . . stands a dam.”

 

McPhee approvingly characterized green opposition to hydropower as motivated by a form of spiritual symbolic warfare. “The conservation movement is a mystical and religious force, and possibly the reaction to dams is so violent because rivers are the ultimate metaphors of existence, and dams destroy rivers,” he wrote in 1971. “Humiliating nature, a dam is evil, placed and solid,” Despite such “mystical” intuitions, hydropower remains humanity’s largest source of renewable electricity, and one of the fastest-growing such sources.

 

Hydroelectric dams have “a history of flooding tribal lands, devastating fish populations, and disrupting many beneficial functions of rivers,” Bill Corcoran of the Sierra Club told the Washington Post, which noted that “due in part to environmental opposition, the United States has not begun construction on a major hydroelectric dam since the 1970s.”

 

Deep-blue Washington State, where roughly two-thirds of electricity comes from dams, according to the Energy Information Adminstration (EIA), is regularly pressured by groups like the League of Conservation Voters (and now by the Biden administration) not just to stop building hydroelectric dams, but also to actively remove them for the dubious rationale of protecting fish.

 

Something very similar is true for nuclear power, especially in blue states. Environmentalists regularly politically and legally pressure left-wing governments to block or slow CO2-free energy-development projects in favor of mostly non-existent alternatives.

 

A classic example of this would be the 1983 sabotage of the $6 billion dollar Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant by New York governor Mario Cuomo, a Democrat who was the father of future governor Andrew Cuomo and CNN news anchor Chris Cuomo. At the time, Mario Cuomo was widely considered a potential front-runner for the Democratic nomination for president and sabotaged the plant to blatantly pander to anti-nuclear environmentalists after it was already open, passing costs directly on to New York taxpayers.

 

Environmentalists first artificially inflate the price of nuclear power with frankly ridiculous regulations and legal actions, then claim that their own actions have made the technology too expensive to pursue. “The entire nuclear industry has become an overpriced distraction,” Lukas Ross of the environmental group Friends of the Earth told the Washington Post after it identified deep-red South Carolina’s many nuclear reactors as a key reason for its remarkably low CO2 emissions.

 

Since clean-energy projects such as nuclear reactors and hydroelectric dams often take a long time to build, the simple uncertainty of what CO2-free energy project environmentalists will try to turn off next actively impairs their alleged goals to fight global warming.

 

The other much-maligned energy source that deserves credit for lowering the country’s emissions is natural gas. It’s currently the largest source of U.S. electricity today, powering almost 40 percent of the country. Coal and nuclear power provide about 20 and 18 percent, respectively, according to the EIA. Roughly 68 percent of the credit for falling CO2 emissions is directly attributable to the switch from coal to natural gas, according to the EIA.

 

In contrast, the wind and solar power often favored by environmentalists provide only 10 and 3 percent of U.S. electricity. And environmentalists’ once-unconditional support for wind and solar power appears to be ending, as activists are turning their legal firepower against them in their endless crusade to oppose every source of energy that actually exists.

 

Environmentalists increasingly vehemently oppose all of these options. Due to the legal and political pressures that activists can apply, blue-state governments have an incredibly unreliable and capricious track record on the very CO2-free energy projects they claim to want. In a fitting metaphor, many environmental activists quite openly say they want electric cars, but they oppose the construction of factories to build them.

 

Another narrative-busting fact in the Washington Post analysis is that red states lead the nation in wind power, and it’s not even close. It seems that practical considerations — such as the fact that wind energy is simply easier to harness in the vast flat stretches of the Great Plains than in other areas — explains the mismatch between progressive rhetoric and reality. The places that are great at providing wind or solar power are very sparsely populated. No amount of vocal enthusiasm can change these energy sources’ need for very specific landscape conditions.

 

And in an ironic twist, most of the states with the terrain and natural advantage necessary to make wind and solar power actually workable are deep red — meaning the electricity must be expensively moved via transmission lines to the blue states where demand is high. Meeting President Biden’s global-warming goals with wind and solar would require the U.S. to have about five times as many transmission lines by 2050 as it does today, according to a 2020 Princeton study.

 

However, more environmentalists are now opposing the transmission lines necessary to actually move the electricity they demand, as it’s better for them to have an issue to fundraise on. A proposed 101-mile line to move wind power out of Iowa is facing lawsuits due to what environmentalists call “‘significant negative impacts’ on the environment, wildlife, property values, agriculture, outdoor recreation and tourism.” And the Sierra Club has launched a green crusade of legal action against a hydropower-transmission line in New England.

 

The Washington Post piece is a much-needed reality check that calls out large swaths of the environmental movement for irrationally fearing nuclear power, decrying natural gas, viewing hydropower dams as the embodiment of evil, and unrealistically promoting solar and wind as the best way to generate energy regardless of local conditions only to sharply turn on those technologies.

 

Environmentalists who genuinely care about lowering CO2 emissions should follow Harry Stevens’s lead and show a willingness to consider the data — even when it means evolving their worldview, breaking progressive shibboleths, and reimagining the future of energy production.