“[It] is very frustrating that after 25 years of the anti-pessimists being proven entirely right, and the doomsayers being proven entirely wrong, their credibility and influence waxes ever greater. That’s the bad news. The good news is that there is every scientific reason to be joyful about the trends in the condition of the Earth, and hopeful for humanity’s future, even if we are falsely told the outlook is grim. So Happy Earth Day.”
[Editor note: This post reprints the Earth Day 1995 essay of Julian Simon, “Earth Day: Spiritually Uplifting, Intellectually Debased.” Posts about the ideas of Simon (1932–1997), an inspiration to this blog, can be found here]
…April 22 [1995] marks the 25th anniversary of Earth Day. Now as then its message is spiritually uplifting. But all reasonable persons who look at the statistical evidence now available must agree that Earth Day’s scientific premises are entirely wrong.
“Policies that force use of more expensive, less reliable energy push costs throughout the economy and place the heaviest burden on the world’s poor and low-income citizens. We need all forms of energy to address global needs, and we must recognize the strengths and limitations of each choice. Advanced coal is the sustainable fuel at scale that can meet these needs.”
– Gregory Boyce, CEO, Peabody Energy, April 3, 2014.
Peabody Energy–“the world’s largest private-sector coal company and a global leader in sustainable mining and clean coal solutions … in more than 25 countries on six continents”—has started a good conversation. Lifting countless millions out of energy poverty into energy modernism is worth our best thinking and debate.
Peabody’s call to reduce energy inequality between the haves and have nots challenges the “Let them eat cake” conceit of so many energy statists/elitists. …
“As citizens, we need to call on our leaders to make thoughtful choices about where to site industrial-scale development and renewable energy projects, and to create a legacy for our national parks and to public lands everywhere.” – Mark Butler, “Saving the Mojave from the Solar Threat,” Los Angeles Times , March 25, 2014. “‘Soft’ energy sources are horribly land intensive…. The greenest possible strategy is to mine and to bury, to fly and to tunnel, to search high and low, where the life mostly isn’t, and to leave the edge, the space in the middle, living and green.” – Peter Huber, Hard Green; Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists (New York: Basic Books, 1999), pp. 107–108.
Hard-green energies (fossil fuels, uranium) have a major ecological advantage over politically-correct soft energy (wind, solar): less infrastructure requirement, including land. …