Going green has become a fad these days, and up to a point, that could be genuinely helpful to the planet. But if done imprudently or irrationally on a national or international scale, it can be disastrous.
Ethanol, for instance, was supposed to be a green advance resulting in less consumption of oil, and therefore less dependence on foreign imports as well as pollution and fewer greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere.
It now seems obvious that at least the corn-based variety won’t ever make a significant dent in oil use, even though it is sending gas-pump prices upwards while its production actually emits more greenhouse gases than gas-only cars could dream of.
Very nearly criminally, growing increased amounts of lucrative corn for ethanol at the expense of crops also boosts food costs and, in some particularly distressed areas, contributes to hunger. Few question this fact these days except for profiting special interests and the politicians who seek their support.
But easily available if widely ignored scientific analyses long ago predicted what did in fact eventuate, just as convincing analyses on the vast benefits of biotech grains have been ignored, especially in Europe.
As Henry Miller of Hoover Institution at Stanford University has observed, “Genetic modification offers plant breeders the tools to make old crop plants do spectacular new things. In two dozen countries, farmers are using genetically modified crop varieties to produce higher yields, with less use of chemical pesticides and reduced impact on the environment.”
There’s more, but anti-modernist superstitions perpetuated by radical green groups have led to unnecessarily inhibiting regulations in the United States and paranoia about “Frankenfoods” in Europe, slowing the progress of a famine-conquering technology. The good news comes from a published report telling us that the current food shortages appear to be lessening some of the opposition.
A great, truly green tool is nuclear power, but green organizations have been so effective in spreading their unfounded fears of this non-polluting, extraordinarily safe energy source that they and kowtowing politicians have stymied industry growth in the U.S. for years.
Disposing of nuclear waste in an endlessly studied national depository in Nevada should be no major concern, despite political prattle to the contrary, and if you are hoping windmills and solar devices will do a fraction of the work nuclear will do, think again. They simply will not, whatever some of our leaders may believe.
To avert imagined catastrophic climate change, the Senate is considering a bill that would mandate reductions of greenhouse emissions by 66 percent over the next four decades, and even with nuclear energy _ and in the absence of technological breakthroughs _ that could give us catastrophic social change.
As has been noted by Patrick J. Michaels, a professor at the University of Virginia, we would simply have to live with less energy, which is another way of saying we would have to live with less of everything: health care, transportation, food, clothing, housing, you name it.
Publications these days are filled with advice on how individuals can go green, doing everything from riding bikes for short trips to turning off computers at night. All of this can be useful, and contribute to what is already an environment made many times cleaner over recent decades by a society that could afford the mostly practical steps it took.
Establish grandiose, impoverishing ambitions in the name of speculations with no settled scientific grounding, and “going green” could come someday to seem the equivalent of having gone bananas.
Examiner columnist Jay Ambrose is a former Washington opinion writer and editor of two dailies. He can be reached at: [email protected]
