The environmentalists used to pretend that theirs was a vital grass-roots movement. However, today, the pseudo-popular movement is an arm of a massive bureaucracy full of contradictions.
One such contradiction is the promotion of “degrowth” as a means of sustainability.
Real growth is a natural development of all living beings—including humans. It is a process that is part of God’s creation. The only force that stops it is death. To de-grow is to shrink. Yet, in the natural world, shrinkage comes only with decay.
The environmentalists seek an impossible condition, shrinking without decay. Three examples of degrowth tactics illustrate this impossible quest.
First, there is the recent threat of banning natural gas stoves. The second example is replacing petroleum-burning vehicles with those using electricity. The last is the ongoing attempt to replace electricity generated by “fossil fuels” with solar and wind power.
Cooking With Gas?
The debate over gas and electric stoves has gone on for a century. Gas partisans argued that flames were more variable and easier to control than an electric coil, while electricity advocates claimed that the coils were cleaner and safer. However, until recently, the debate was centered on personal preference.
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The effort to eliminate gas stoves began in California. In July 2019, Berkeley became the first city to ban gas hookups in new buildings. The Sierra Club’s magazine laid out the reasoning.
“Buildings are the second-largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in California after transportation, and gas appliances like furnaces and stoves are partially to blame. Each year, the infrastructure that funnels gas to buildings and homes leaks enough methane (a greenhouse gas 86 times more potent than carbon dioxide) to match the emissions of all vehicles in the country.” It argued that children in homes with gas stoves were forty-two percent more likely to suffer from asthma.
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However, critics have found the research faulty—or at least questionable. The Dispatch explained the methodology behind one such study.
“[A] 2022 study measured air quality in kitchens with gas stoves, but in doing so, they used ‘clear plastic sheets’ that were ‘sealed along the ceiling, walls, and floor’ to prevent air from the rest of the house from circulating with the air in the kitchen. After the kitchen was sealed off, they turned on the gas burners and took air-quality measurements. This is hardly a representative example of how consumers cook in their kitchens.”
Berkeley was not the only city in California to adopt such nonsense. By February 2023, the Sierra Club website could list seventy-six California communities that had taken similar steps.
A Belated Christmas Present
The war over gas appliances became national. The Department of Energy (DOE) tried to ban them, but public reaction was withering. As a parting shot, the Biden Administration released new rules that ban instantaneous water heaters, another natural gas-powered appliance. An industry group, the American Gas Association (AGA), argued that “40% of customers directly impacted by the rule would see a net cost increase from this rule.”
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The timing of the new rule is also suspect—December 26, 2024. Not many consumers pay attention to the price of water heaters on the day after Christmas.
Contrary to the concealed process banning gas appliances, the government has made no secret of its preference for electric vehicles over those powered by gasoline or diesel fuel.
The War Against Cars
Understanding the environmentalists’ animosity against the automobile requires looking back to the mid-sixties. In several major cities, automobile-based pollution reached dangerous levels. Congress passed The Clean Air Act in 1970. It called for automobile manufacturers to effect a ninety percent reduction by 1975. After massive investments, the manufacturers achieved this goal. The difference was dramatic.
Implementing and enforcing these policies required a vast government structure. When the industry achieved the 1975 goals, that bureaucracy went after the remaining ten percent. The rule of diminishing returns applied. Massive efforts to remove the final ten percent proved far more costly than getting rid of the first ninety. The goal became zero pollution, which even the most efficient internal combustion engine will never achieve.
Thus, the bureaucrats began to promote electric vehicles (EVs). However, EVs have massive inherent limitations. EVs are more expensive to make, and therefore, the purchase price is high. The energy that even the best battery can store is severely limited, making the EV inconvenient for long-distance travel. Adverse conditions—primarily low temperatures and heavier loads—reduce the range dramatically. Additionally, the ecological damage is not eliminated, but merely shifted to the electric generating plant.
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For these reasons, most American consumers reject EVs. The bureaucrats tried to subsidize EV purchases and the infrastructure needed to ensure convenient charging. These expensive efforts proved to be of little effect. Their alternate course is to artificially increase the cost of internal combustion vehicles by creating new taxes and raising existing ones. However, such moves often prove politically unpopular.
An All-Electric World
The third big push is related to electric appliances and automobiles—replace “fossil fuels” (oil, coal and natural gas) with “clean” and “cheap” electric generators powered by wind and sun. Government bureaucracies have pushed these “alternate energy sources” for at least thirty years. Those efforts have largely been wasted.
A key component of any energy structure is reliability. Adverse conditions like heat, cold, darkness, etc., require increased energy. Wind and solar are inherently unreliable because the same conditions that increase demand decrease the energy they produce.
Second, both wind and solar require immense areas. So far, attempts to find complementary uses for the wind and solar “farms” have proven largely unsuccessful. A hundred acres of solar panels cannot be used for agriculture, and massive windmills make very poor neighbors.
Expensive Cheap Power
Finally, these “cheap” energy sources are prohibitively expensive. While the sun and wind are free, collecting their power is costly. Since these systems do not work when there is no wind or sun, electricity producers must set up expensive parallel systems running on fossil fuels as a backup. The Wall Street Journal examined the worldwide energy market and came to startling conclusions.
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“One study shows that in China, the real cost of solar power, on average, is twice as high as that of coal. Similarly, a peer-reviewed study of Germany and Texas shows that solar and wind are many times more expensive than fossil fuels. Germany, the U.K., Spain, and Denmark, all of which increasingly rely on solar and wind power, have some of the world’s most expensive electricity.”
Controlling the Current—And Life Itself
Attacking the energy sector is one way to bring down the West. Unlike other energy sources, electricity is centered on a highly vulnerable grid.
Radical ecologists hold that humanity is a threat to the environment and, therefore, all development must be curbed. Those in the human extinction movement, for example, claim the only way to save the world is for humans to cease to exist. All industrial development is harmful. Its activists seek to reduce what might be left of humanity to animal levels.
Thus, the real target is not sustainability but humanity itself. Any changes, even incremental ones, are welcomed to eliminate the human footprint. One way to speed the process is to overburden the West with unreasonable and excessive regulations to hasten the degrowth process.
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