Many policies championed by progressive environmentalists are so stupid they harm the environment. The New Yorker unintentionally furnishes an example in “Annals of a Warming Planet: What To Do With Climate Emotions.”
Progressive Jia Tolento writes about orangutans, which she mistakenly thinks are threatened by global warming. But in reality, these intelligent apes are threatened by a foolish attempt to stop it: the policy of using palm oil as a “renewable” resource to replace fossil fuels, even though palm oil production means destroying vibrant jungles in Malaysia and Indonesia and replacing them with palm-tree monocultures that release significant stored carbon. Those jungles are where the orangutans live.
Her story is about Tim Wehage, a progressive environmentalist who has lived with panic for years at the thought of climate change:
He heard from a local that orangutans were going extinct in Indonesia; he felt dazed by grief. He took a tour of the Sumatran jungle, hoping to see an orangutan while he still could, and then saw miles and miles of palm-oil plantations, where the orangutan’s native habitat had been clear-cut for the consumer crop. …. “For years, you read all the articles,” Wehage told me recently, over the phone. “You look at pictures of the pollution, you think about the greed that fuels it, and you feel upset. But then, when you’re there, you understand that it’s so much worse than anything you could read.” He returned to Seattle overwhelmed.
But the demand for palm oil is not an artifact of climate change. Indeed, it was created partly by environmentalist policies designed to replace fossil fuels with renewable fuels. Europe provided financial incentives for palm oil production as a form of “bioenergy.” In 2019, the European Union noted in a 2019 press release issued in Indonesia:
The European Union (EU) is committed to ensuring the sustainability of bioenergy, and is advancing towards its 2020 and 2030 energy and climate targets.... a new binding, renewable energy target for the EU for 2030 of at least 32% was agreed between the European Parliament and the EU Member States in June last year through the adoption of the Renewable Energy Directive (REDII)….All vegetable oils are treated equally [including] Palm oil.
The foolishness of this policy reminds me of a Supreme Court justice’s warning that the “greatest dangers … lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.”
Green activists’ past support for palm oil production is no stupider than their ongoing hostility to nuclear power.
Nuclear power is best for the environment, as a recent study in Scientific Reports shows, notes science writer Ronald Bailey. But green activists have successfully lobbied governments to shut down nuclear plants in many countries. For example, “Germany idiotically shut down its last three nuclear power plants” this year. “Until 2011, the country obtained one-quarter of its electricity from 17 nuclear power plants. As a December 2022 study in Scientific Reports shows, turning off this carbon-free energy source is incredibly short-sighted for combatting climate change and protecting natural landscapes.” The result is that Germany is now burning more coal and wood for energy and heating, increasing air pollution and greenhouse gases. Coal is the fossil fuel that generates the most pollution.
Nuclear waste is tiny and compact; waste from most other forms of energy production including solar panels is bulky and poisonous. An energy expert notes that “solar panels require 17 times more materials in the form of cement, glass, concrete, and steel than do nuclear plants, and create over 200 times more waste,” such as “dust from toxic heavy metals including lead, cadmium, and chromium.”
Unlike wind farms, nuclear power plants don’t kill birds. The biggest utility that generates wind power pleaded guilty to federal crimes for killing 150 eagles.
Nuclear plants produce no air pollution or greenhouse gas emissions (they emit only harmless steam into the air). France and Sweden replaced most of their fossil-fueled electricity with nuclear power, and as a result, ended up emitting less than a tenth of the world average of carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour.
Using nuclear power would save massive amounts of land that is being consumed by solar and wind farms. The Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s Jonas Kristiansen Nøland notes that “the spatial extent of nuclear power is 99.7% less than onshore wind power—in other words, 350 times less use of land area.” He adds, “An energy transition based on nuclear power alone would save 99.75% of environmental encroachments in 2050. We could even remove most of the current environmental footprint we have already caused.”
As Ron Bailey observes, “Nuclear power massively spares land for nature while producing 24-7 emissions-free electricity. That’s why closing down 17 perfectly good nuclear power plants is environmentally stupid.”
