Plunder and Deceit (13 page)

In this milieu of statist-generated delirium, the degrowthers ensconced in the federal government are imposing on society infinite “ameliorative” rules, regulations, and coercive edicts, and the necessary fines, penalties, and even jail sentences to enforce them. And those who object to these governmental commands and challenge the “science” behind them are ridiculed and dismissed as, among other things, “climate-change deniers” or “flat-earthers.”

In the last several years, particularly during the Obama administration, the federal government has embraced key elements of the degrowther movement and issued a rash of “major” regulations. Major regulations are rules that are likely to result in “(1) An annual effect on the economy of $100 million or more; (2) A major increase in costs or prices for consumers, individual industries, Federal, State, or local government agencies, or geographic regions; or (3) Significant adverse effects on competition, employment, investment, productivity, innovation, or on the ability of United States–based enterprises to compete with foreign-based enterprises in domestic or export markets.”
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The EPA is the main federal governmental fortress for the degrowth agenda. Consistent with the ideological aims of the degrowth movement, the EPA has dedicated itself to gutting the production of carbon-based resources such as coal, oil, and natural gas as supplies of relatively cheap and abundant electricity and fuel. In recent years, the EPA has tenaciously ramped up its regulatory efforts to cripple the production of energy from these sources. Since 2010, the EPA has issued sixty-five major regulations affecting all manner of industries.
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In 2014 alone, the EPA promulgated thirteen major regulations.
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Affected industries include: energy companies (particularly coal companies); the auto industry; commercial and solid waste incinerators; portland cement manufacturing; oceangoing ships; petrochemical companies; the airline industry; the construction industry; and home builders and contractors.
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In 2015, the EPA is completing twenty-five major regulations and plans on proposing twenty-six new major regulations.
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Affected industries include, again, energy companies, the auto industry, and construction, as well as farming.
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The Heritage Foundation concludes that by 2038, the carbon-dioxide rules alone, which phase out the use of coal, an abundant natural resource in the United States, will cost the nation nearly six hundred thousand jobs and an aggregate gross domestic product decrease of $2.23 trillion.
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Lest we forget, before the Industrial Revolution, for many centuries mankind's condition experienced little improvement. As University of California historian and economics professor Dr. Gregory Clark explains, “Life expectancy was no higher in 1800 than for hunter-gathers; thirty to thirty-five years. Stature, a measure of both the quality of diet and children's exposure to disease, was higher in the Stone Age than in 1800.”
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Even for the relatively wealthy, as recently as the eighteenth century life was very difficult. Moreover, the “modest comforts” of society in 1800 “were purchased only through a life of unrelenting drudgery.”
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In America today, even poor families are much better off than is widely believed. This is not to say that they do not struggle or to downplay cases of significant hardship, but it is worth knowing the statistical facts, most of which are generated by the federal government. For example, a recent Heritage Foundation study found that despite media and other portrayals, including those of the degrowthers, acute and widespread hunger mostly does not exist in the United States. “The U.S. Department of Agriculture collects data on these topics in its household food security survey. For 2009, the survey showed: 96 percent of poor parents stated that their children were never hungry at any time during the year because they could not afford food; 83 percent of poor families reported having enough food to eat; 82 percent of poor adults reported never being hungry at any time in the prior year due to lack of money for food. Other government surveys show that the average consumption of protein, vitamins, and minerals is virtually the same for poor and middle-class children and is well above recommended norms in most cases.”
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In addition, “[o]ver the course of a year, 4 percent of poor persons become temporarily homeless. Only 9.5 percent of the poor live in mobile homes or trailers, 49.5 percent live in separate single-family houses or townhouses, and 40 percent live in apartments. Forty-two percent of poor households actually own their own homes. Only 6 percent of poor households are overcrowded. More than two-thirds have more than two rooms per person. The vast majority of the homes or apartments of the poor are in good repair.” It concluded that “[b]y their own reports, the average poor person had sufficient funds to meet all essential needs and to obtain medical care for family members throughout the year whenever needed.”
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Infectious diseases and other illnesses have been rampant throughout human history. While many diseases still plague mankind, enormous advances have been made in treating or eliminating untold numbers of them. This progress did not magically occur from feel-good intentions and redistributionist policies. Although public health actions have contributed to this remarkable development, modern medicine owes its evolution, in significant part, to science made possible by abundant energy derived from carbon sources.

University of Chicago history professor Dr. Kenneth Pomeranz explains that the European technological breakthroughs of the Industrial Revolution are based appreciably on the abundance of coal as a viable natural resource. He states: “Thus it seems sensible, after all, to look at the mining and uses of coal as the most likely European technological advantage that was purely home-grown, crucial to its nineteenth-century breakthrough, and (unlike textiles) not dependent for its full flowering on European access to overseas resources.”
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By the year 1800, economists believe, humanity had reached the limits of development without the technological marvels of the Industrial Revolution. “All societies before 1800 had to produce resources—food, energy, raw materials—on a renewable basis from a fixed land area. The ‘advanced organic technology' of Europe and Asia was at its natural limits by 1800.”
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The technological developments of the Industrial Revolution were not attainable without “plentiful coal and the easing of other resource constraints made possible by the New World.”
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For example, “Britain's coal output would increase fourteen times from 1815 to 1900, but its sugar imports increased roughly eleven-fold over the same period, and its cotton imports increased a stunning twenty-fold.”
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Therefore, economists conclude, “Europe made [the] leap because it had coal reserves readily accessible to its population centers.”
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Furthermore, it had “the massive largely empty land area of the Americas relatively close at hand, to lift for a time the ecological constraint with a continent-sized flood of food and raw materials.”
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Coal, an abundant and efficient resource, in combination with the modern market-based capitalist system, clearly benefited poorer people more than other groups. Dr. Pomeranz continues: “[U]nskilled labor has reaped more gains than any other group. Marx and Engels, trumpeting their gloomy prognostications in
The Communist Manifesto
 . . . could not have been more wrong about the fate of unskilled workers.”
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Beginning in 1815, “real wages in England for both farm laborers and the urban unskilled had begun the inexorable rise that has created affluence for all.”
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Dr. Clark also points out that women in particular benefited from the Industrial Revolution. “Rising incomes switched the emphasis of production away from sectors such as agriculture (which demanded strength) toward such sectors as manufacturing and service (in which dexterity was more important).”
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The examples of capitalism generating human and societal improvement are infinite. As I explained in
Liberty and Tyranny
: “[S]cientific and technological advances, especially since the Industrial Revolution, have hugely benefited mankind. Running water and indoor plumbing enable fresh water to be brought into the home and dirty water to be removed through a system of aqueducts, wells, dams, and sewage treatment facilities; irrigating and fertilizing land creates more stable and plentiful food supplies; harnessing natural resources such as coal, oil, and gas make possible the delivery of power to homes, hospitals, schools, and businesses and fuel for automobiles, trucks, and airplanes; networks of paved roads promote mobility, commerce, and assimilation; and the invention of medical devices and discovery of chemical substances extend and improve the quality of life.”
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Carbon dioxide is a naturally occurring by-product of photosynthesis. It is not and never has been a pollutant. Furthermore, it is not covered under the Clean Air Act. Indeed, carbon dioxide makes up a minuscule fraction of greenhouse gases (water vapor is the most significant element), and greenhouse gases make up no more than about 2 percent of the entire atmosphere.
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Yet, without greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, temperatures would drop so low that the planet would freeze, oceans would turn into ice, and life would cease to exist. Dr. Patrick Moore, a top ecologist and cofounder of Greenpeace, is among many experts who have insisted that “There is no scientific proof that human emissions of carbon dioxide are the dominant cause of the minor warming of the Earth's atmosphere over the past 100 years. If there were such proof it would be written down for all to see. No actual proof, as it is understood in science, exists.”
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Dr. Moore is not alone. Some thirty thousand other experts agree with him.
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No matter, the EPA zealously and relentlessly abuses and exceeds its regulatory authority, delegated by Congress under the Clean Air Act (enacted by Congress in the 1970s and amended in the 1990s), which was originally intended to limit the emissions of actual pollutants. It repeatedly usurps the law, having been provided cover by the U.S. Supreme Court for unleashing numerous and onerous rules intended to wipe out entire industries that provide safe and reliable energy to millions of homes and businesses.
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Consequently, in 2013, 2014, and 2015, the EPA released (or is planning to release) a series of regulations designed to destroy the coal industry and diminish the oil and gas industries. The first of these rules, the “New Source Performance Rule” (NSPS), mandates that every newly constructed coal-burning power plant in the United States use a costly and unproven technology to reduce its carbon emissions.
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The cost of implementing this technology is so exorbitant it makes building most new, coal-burning power plants impracticable. There is currently only one coal-burning power plant under construction in the United States. Its erection has been stymied by exorbitant cost overruns and delays.
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The second of these regulations, the “Existing Source Performance Rule” (ESPR), sets preposterously high emission standards for power plants, including those that burn coal.
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The goal of this rule is to force current power plants that use carbon sources such as coal and natural gas to charge increasingly higher rates to consumers for power, eventually driving these energy companies out of business.

The harsh consequences of these sorts of regulations are evident in Canada, where the residents of Ontario have experienced huge increases in power costs. The
Financial Post
reports that “The cost of electricity for the average Ontario consumer went from $780 [to] more than $1,800, with more increases to come.” This increase occurred because the controlling political party replaced “fossil-fuel generated electricity with renewable energy from wind, solar and biomass.”
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Reliance on renewable energy, however, raised a new set of problems. “Billions more were needed for transmission lines to hook up the new wind and solar generators. At the same time, wind and solar generation—being unstable—needed back-up generation, which forced the construction of new gas plants.” The construction of new plants led to a government boondoggle. “The gas plants themselves became the target of further government intervention, leading to the $1 billion gas plant scandal.”
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And the third of these regulations, “the Green Power Plan,” targets oil and gas production, including hydraulic fracturing or “fracking,” which uses technological advances to extract natural gas from shale rock layers by imposing severe limits on methane emissions.
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Methane is an even smaller greenhouse gas element than carbon dioxide. At a time when the United States is on the verge of realizing the half-century-old goal of energy independence, the EPA is actively suffocating the industries, innovations, and technologies responsible for the progress. And it is doing so despite the fact that its own recent study found “no evidence that these mechanisms have led to widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources in the United States.”
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The EPA's rules are only the latest steps in an endless staircase of planned governmental actions intended to phase out carbon as an energy source, institute by coercion major parts of the degrowth agenda through deindustrialization, drive up the cost of energy production and use, and ultimately drive down the quality of life and living standards of Americans—who are supposedly fouling the earth with their capitalist extravagances. In fact, the degrowthers refer to this effort as “Energy Descent Action Plans.” These plans are part of a broader social-engineering project known as “Transition.”
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And Transition is only one of many action plans for degrowth involving “pricing carbon out of the economy,” “shifting from an energy-obese to an energy-healthy society,” “establishing a ‘New Green Deal,' ” and “rapidly relocalising the economy.”
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