by Edward Ring
Modern environmentalism often strays from its original purpose, advancing policies that unintentionally damage ecosystems, strain economies, and benefit powerful corporate interests.
The first Earth Day
was organized in 1970 in response to growing public concern for the
environment. Many of these concerns were entirely justified. In 1969,
for example, an oil slick along an industrialized stretch of the Cuyahoga River
in Ohio caught fire, generating national awareness of the need to
reduce water pollution. Similarly, in coastal cities in California, most
notably in Los Angeles, the exhaust from unleaded gasoline created air
pollution so dense you couldn’t see the hills a few miles away.
We’ve come a long way in 51 years. This month, as Americans celebrate
Earth Day on April 22, we are challenged to differentiate between
legitimate environmental priorities and those priorities chosen for us
by special interests with ulterior motives for whom environmentalism is a
sentiment to be manipulated.
Here are ten issues where environmentalism has been misused, with
consequences that have either been of no benefit whatsoever to the
environment or have even caused harm.
(1) We are in a climate crisis
We may as well begin with the most controversial environmentalist
claim, that our planet is at imminent risk of catastrophic climate
change. The problem with this claim is two-fold. First, there remains
vigorous—if suppressed—debate over whether the data actually supports
this claim. There is ample evidence that average global temperatures are
not rapidly increasing, if they are even increasing at all. There is
also strong evidence
that extreme weather events are not increasing but rather that our
ability to detect them has improved and that population increases have
led more people to live in places that are particularly vulnerable to
extreme weather. Second, even if there is some truth to the claims of
climate catastrophists, it is not possible to precipitously transform
our entire energy infrastructure. The technology isn’t ready, the
funding isn’t available, and most nations will not participate.
Adaptation is our only rational course of action.
(2) There are too many people
Based on extrapolations back in 1970, this may have appeared to be
the case because populations worldwide at that time were rapidly
growing. But today, in almost every nation, the inverse is now true:
birthrates are well below replacement levels. Even in those nations that
continue to experience rapid population growth, the rate of growth is
following the same pattern of decline. The United Nations now estimates
the total global population to top out at around 10 billion people,
after which it is projected to decline. This means the rapid population
growth we’ve seen over the past two centuries, where the global population octupled
from 1 billion in 1804 to over 8 billion by 2024, is over. There is not
one trend anywhere on earth that contradicts this pattern. Humanity
faces a future of too few people, not too many.
(3) We are running out of “fossil” fuel
While this is technically correct, the situation is nowhere close to
what was famously predicted in 1956 by American geologist M. Hubbert,
who claimed oil production in the U.S. would peak by 1970
and then slide into permanent decline. In the U.S. and around the
world, new technologies and new discoveries have put total reserves of
oil, along with natural gas and coal, at record highs despite increasing
demand. According to the authoritative Statistical Review on Global
Energy, based on current consumption, proven reserves
could supply oil for 61 years, natural gas for 50, and coal for 208.
This grossly understates the big picture, however, because proven and
recoverable reserves are being expanded all the time. “Unproven”
reserves, waiting to be discovered, will easily double the amount of
time left. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t continue to research new
sources of energy. But we have a century or more to sort this out.
(4) Biofuel is renewable and sustainable
Nothing could be further from the truth. Biofuel will never supply
more than a small fraction of our energy requirements, and attempts to
scale it beyond a niche product have produced catastrophic results. Just
to use California as an example, the current yield of ethanol from a
corn crop stands at not quite 500 gallons per acre. Californians consumed 13.6 billion gallons
of gasoline in 2023. Since ethanol has 33 percent less energy per
gallon than conventional gasoline, that means replacing gasoline with
carbon-neutral ethanol would require 20.3 billion gallons of ethanol
production, which in turn would require 63,400 square miles of irrigated
farmland and over 120 million acre-feet of water per crop. To put this
in perspective, California’s entire expanse of irrigated farmland only
totals around 14,000 square miles, and California’s entire agricultural sector only consumes around 30 million acre-feet of water per year. Worldwide, biofuel crops already consume an estimated 500,000 square miles while only offsetting 2 percent of the global consumption of transportation fuel.
(5) Offshore wind energy is renewable and sustainable
Absolutely not. Wind turbine blades, on land or offshore, routinely
kill raptors, condors, and other magnificent endangered birds, along
with bats and insects. Offshore, there are additional harmful impacts.
Electromagnetic fields from undersea cables produce birth deformities
in marine life and produce magnetic fields that disrupt the orientation
abilities of some fish. Their low-frequency operational noise disrupts
sounds made by fish for mating, spawning, and navigating. The turbines
“increase sea surface temperatures and alter upper-ocean hydrodynamics
in ways scientists do not yet understand” and “whip up sea sediment and
generate highly turbid wakes that are 30-150 meters wide and several
kilometers in length, having a major impact on primary production by
phytoplankton, which are the base of marine food chains.” California’s
official plan is to install 25,000 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity
in floating wind farms 20 miles offshore. At 10 megawatts each,
California’s treasured marine ecosystem will be disrupted by the
presence of somewhere between 2,500 floating wind turbines, each one
nearly 1,000 feet high. They will need 7,500 tethering cables descending 4,000 feet to the seafloor, along with 2,500 high-voltage cables. Expect ratepayers and taxpayers to subsidize a project that could cost $300 billion or more to build systems that may only have a lifespan of 10-20 years.
(6) Renewables are renewable
No. They’re not.
Renewables most in favor with environmentalists are solar and wind
farms with battery farms to store the intermittently generated
electricity. Just the consumption of natural resources to build these
renewables is hardly sustainable. For example, using data from the
International Energy Agency, geopolitical writer Peter Ziehan calculated
the mineral requirements
for power generation, comparing renewables to natural gas in terms of
kilograms of minerals per megawatt of capacity. Offshore wind: 16,000
kg/MW, onshore wind: 10,000 kg/MW, solar photovoltaic: 7,000 kg/MW, and
natural gas: 2,000 kg/MW. Compounding this disparity is the fact that
natural gas power plants can operate for 60 years or more, whereas solar
installations are operable for 30 years at most, and wind turbines
substantially less than that, depending on where they’re situated. As
for EVs, Ziehan calculated kilograms of minerals per vehicle, with EVs
requiring over 200 kg/vehicle, compared to conventional cars at only 35
kg/vehicle. It’s easy enough to see what this means. Replacing
conventional energy with “renewables” has ignited an expansion of
worldwide mining in nations with minimal environmental protections.
(7) Renewables can replace fossil fuels
Not anytime soon. Worldwide, in 2022, 82 percent of global energy
was still derived from fossil fuels. For everyone on earth to consume
half as much energy per capita as Americans, global energy production
will have to double. Based on those two cold facts, fossil fuels are
going to be around for a very long time. Even these statistics
understate the challenge. In 2023, most of the non-fossil fuel energy
produced was from either nuclear (4.0 percent) or hydroelectric (6.8
percent) sources, leaving only 7.5 percent from allegedly renewable
sources. And of the remaining 7.5 percent “renewables,” two-thirds of it
was biofuel production, which should not be considered renewable or, at
the very least, must be considered already at maximum capacity. That
leaves only about 2.5 percent of worldwide energy production coming from
renewables, if you want to call them that, primarily wind, solar, and
geothermal sources.
(8) New housing must be confined to the footprint of existing cities
This is not true for California, nor for the United States, and not
even worldwide. Nonetheless, urban containment has been enforced in
California ever since we stopped investing in expanding our energy,
water, and transportation infrastructure, resulting in 94 percent of the
population living on only 5 percent of the land. But urban containment
isn’t necessary to ensure enough farm production. Even India, the most densely populated large nation on earth, where there are 2,700 people per square mile of farmland, is a net food exporter.
In California, the alleged need for urban containment is truly
ridiculous. Building new homes for ten million new California residents
on quarter-acre lots, with four-person households, and allocating an
equivalent amount for schools, parks, roads, and retail and commercial
areas would only consume 1,953 square miles. This would only increase California’s urban footprint
from 7,800 to 9,700 square miles, i.e., from 5.0 percent to 6.2 percent
of all land in the state. The global trend is people voluntarily
migrating to cities at the same time as the global population is
expected to begin to decline within a few decades. There will be plenty
of room for farms and wilderness even if cities are permitted to expand.
Keeping cities bottled up is misanthropic and misguided, creating
artificially high home prices and unwanted overcrowding.
(9) Mass transit is necessary to achieve sustainability
It’s hard to imagine a claim more at odds with reality. Mass transit
works in extremely dense urban areas where most jobs are located in a
central core. With rare exceptions, such as Manhattan, most metropolitan
areas no longer have this hub-and-spoke model,
which renders economically viable mass transit extremely difficult.
Then there are the challenges introduced during the COVID pandemic,
which drove millions of riders out of mass transit
to either commute in private cars or work from home. Ridership never
recovered. An additional barrier to the readoption of mass transit is
the fact that most cities are unwilling to police and remove disruptive
individuals from the buses and trains, rendering their systems too dangerous
for potential passengers to consider. Finally, along with now-mature
work-from-home technology that is only going to improve, we have innovations just around the corner
that will enable smart cars to convoy at higher speeds, increasing the
capacity of existing roads, as well as a revolution in passenger drones
that will take additional pressure off roads. Why would someone ride
mass transit when they can relax while their own smart vehicle drives
them point-to-point with no interruptions? And why should taxpayers
subsidize mass transit?
(10) Wilderness areas are sacred
This mantra has caused more harm than good to the wilderness.
Litigation pursuant to the Endangered Species Act has severely
restricted, if not put a complete stop to, logging on public land,
although the current White House administration is trying to change that. Since then, over the past 40 years, because fires were suppressed and logging didn’t remove new growth, our forests have become overgrown, resulting in catastrophic fires. Similarly, ESA litigation and environmentalist-inspired regulations put a stop to dredging
in California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, which was the only way to
maintain deep, cool channels favored by salmon ever since the
construction of levees in the 1800s caused silt deposits to accumulate
in what remained of their migration routes. It is important to protect
truly endangered species, but environmentalists often create bigger
problems. Poverty in Africa could be alleviated if environmental restrictions on energy development
were lifted. But as it is, in desperate poverty, Africans are cutting
down their forests for firewood, hunting wild game for food, and poaching dwindling herds
of elephants, rhinos, lions, and other precious and endangered species
for sale to international smugglers. How we manage our wilderness must
be revisited with a reality-based emphasis on results, not ideology.
Moreover, an encouraging fact is that while total forest cover in the
world was in decline for many centuries, over the past 40 years, it has been increasing.
This is the result of several factors: reforestation efforts, migration
to urban areas, which depopulates forest regions; huge improvements in
agricultural productivity, which takes farmland out of production,
allowing for forests to reclaim the land; and maybe even slightly
elevated atmospheric CO₂, which is plant food.
The ideals of environmentalism ought to inspire everyone, but the
policies promulgated in the name of environmentalism are all too often
actually hurting the environment. Examples are the mad rush to develop
renewables and the power of the “climate crisis” narrative to deter
rational cost/benefit analysis of environmentalist policies. The impact
of misguided environmentalism is not merely the fate of wildlife and
wilderness or the health of global ecosystems. It is also economic and,
in practice, has led to profound transfers of wealth as entrenched
special interests thrive on escalating regulations that only the biggest
corporations and wealthiest individuals can navigate. Worldwide, entire
industrial sectors are consolidated, costing nations the resilience and
affordability that a diverse and competitive economy can deliver.
Environmentalism, as it is practiced in the 21st century, is an arm of
globalism, with shades of paternalism and colonialism that often
overshadow its virtues.
The ten myths identified above are some of the fundamental premises
of environmentalism, and they are flawed. They are exploited by special
interests for profit and control. Our challenge is to restore
environmentalism to its honorable roots. We have to recognize and reject
these flawed premises wherever they are applied. We have to recognize
and restructure our regulatory environment to take away the incentives
for opportunism and manipulation. We have to nurture prosperity through
diverse, competitive national economies, recognizing that through
prosperity, we find the resources to invest in genuinely clean and
sustainable technology, as well as the funds to engage in practical
environmental protection.
For Earth Day to remain relevant, we have to rescue environmentalism
from what it has become: a manipulative tool that corporations use to
corner markets and charge more. This will not be easy. But we may begin
by challenging the myths.
Edward Ring is a senior fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is also the
director of water and energy policy for the California Policy Center,
which he co-founded in 2013 and served as its first president. Ring is
the author of Fixing California: Abundance, Pragmatism, Optimism (2021)
and The Abundance Choice: Our Fight for More Water in California (2022).
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2025/04/09/ten-environmentalist-myths/
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