It’s Earth Day, and the Left has one mission — no, not to save the environment, but to make you feel terrible about yourself, especially as an American.
Every April 22, we are invited to feel guilty for driving, flying, eating meat, having children, and existing as a prosperous, industrial civilization. The premise hasn’t changed since the first Earth Day in 1970. Humans are the problem, and the less we produce, consume, and build, the better off the planet will be.
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This is not a robust argument designed to solve environmental problems. It’s a theology of decline dressed up in simple narratives fit for children’s books and cartoons, such as The Lorax or Fern Gully.
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It’s as if the environmentalists haven’t read the news in the past half century. Maybe back in the 70s, shutting down manufacturing facilities and railing against automobiles could be interpreted as good for the environment. Back then, smog choked cities, air quality was mediocre, and waterways certainly could use some cleaning. You could possibly explain their regressive “solutions” as the well-meaning byproduct of their limited imaginations.
But today, the environment is dramatically better than it was when Earth Day was founded, and it got better not because the United States shut down but because America did more. Combined emissions of the nation’s six key air pollutants have fallen 78% since 1970, while the U.S. economy grew more than 320%, the public drove twice as many miles, and the population grew by over 130 million people. New cars are 99% cleaner for common pollutants than 1970 models. The Cuyahoga River, which famously caught fire in 1969, runs clean.
What did it? Not Earth Day guilt, but American innovation, economic growth, and industrial ingenuity.
That’s because when this country produces, we do it cleaner. The shale revolution — which Earth Day environmentalists fought tooth and nail — cut U.S. carbon emissions to a 25-year low during Trump’s first term, reducing emissions more than any other country, including every Paris Agreement signatory. AI-driven data centers are currently deploying the largest private clean energy buildout in American history — solar, batteries, and advanced nuclear — not because of government mandates, but because the market demanded it.
And U.S. manufacturing is four times more emissions-efficient than China’s. When America steps back, China fills the void and doesn’t care one iota about clean air or clean water. China generates more than 60% of its electricity from coal and emits more greenhouse gases than the entire developed world combined. When environmentalists oppose U.S. reindustrialization, they show their hand: environmental stewardship is secondary to their anti-American ideology.
Environmentalists should be begging for the U.S. to produce, build, manufacture, and generate more. Yet Earth Day environmentalism has never updated its diagnosis. It’s still fighting the 1970 war against industry, growth, and human ambition, even as the evidence moved on. Though American dynamism has proven to solve problems, too many so-called environmentalists want to send us back to an age before modern industry.
Unfortunately, this nostalgic, anti-growth mentality has even infected some on the Right. Conservationists of all stripes show it in their approach to public lands. The moment any administration or lawmaker attempts to open a small slice of public land for development or productive use, an entire industry of activists — on both sides of the aisle — rises in protest, litigating and lobbying their way into a frenzy. In their mind, whatever policymakers decided in Theodore Roosevelt’s era over a century ago is sacrosanct and all public lands added from that point are untouchable.
But conserving nature and limiting industry to what it was at some arbitrary point in history is not best for the environment. In fact, it’s often harmful.
Today, the federal government controls 640 million acres — 28% of all U.S. land, including more than 80% of Nevada. Some may count this as a victory. But land “managed” by the government is really just land managed by bureaucrats.
Our national parks have a $23 billion deferred maintenance backlog that somehow grew larger after Congress gave the National Park Service $5.32 billion specifically to fix it. Thanks to overgrown federal forests, fires on federal lands are on average five times the size of fires on nonfederal lands. Nearly 57 million acres of Bureau of Land Management land — larger than the state of Utah — do not meet its own minimum standards for water, vegetation, and soil quality.
There is simply no reason to believe land managed by bureaucracy is better than land managed by individuals — and every reason to believe the opposite.
While the government can’t maintain functioning bathrooms on public lands, private landowners continue to be natural preservationists. Private lands support more than two-thirds of species listed under the Endangered Species Act. Human management, driven by market incentives and private ownership, outperforms government preservation every time because, unsurprisingly, people usually take care of what they own.
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Call it “America first” environmentalism: when we build more in the U.S., do more in the U.S., and embrace the American principles of private property and innovation, the environment wins.
American first environmentalism doesn’t tell you to feel guilty for being human. It asks what actually works. And the answer is always the same: The planet does best when America does more.
Chris Johnson is the founder and president of the American Energy Leadership Institute.
