I recently returned from a trip to the Netherlands. When traveling around that country, one can’t help but notice the wind turbines. They are everywhere! I don’t believe there was ever a time when I couldn’t see a cluster of them on the horizon. A quick Google search revealed that there are 2,144 turbines on land and waterways plus another 462 in the ocean for a total of over 2,600 helping meet the Netherlands’ energy demand.
This made me curious as to how much of the Netherlands electricity is provided by these turbines. The answer, according to Statista, is 18%. I also noticed a large number of solar panels, particularly on the roofs of newer homes. These generate another 13% of the Netherlands’ electrical consumption. While riding a bus across the Belgian countryside I began to ponder how humans were going to ever be able to eliminate fossil fuels if building wind turbines in seemingly every vacant field in a windy country only generates 18% of its electrical demand?
To further study the topic, I read Apocalypse Never by Michael Shellenberger on the plane ride home. The title intrigued me because, if one didn’t know anything about the author, it would be easy to assume a book with this title would be written by a climate change denier. However, I was introduced to Shellenberger’s work during the Twitter Files release. He along with Matt Taibi, Bari Weiss, and a few others were selected by Elon Musk to review and release information related to Twitter’s activities pre-Musk, particularly as it related to government influence and attempted censorship of public discourse. They were chosen because they are respected journalists and writers and aren’t political hacks or haven’t sold out to industrial outlets like CNN, MSNBC and Fox. I’ve watched a number of Shelleberger’s lectures on YouTube on topics other than climate change and they have made me a fan of this level-headed investigator. I wanted to see what he thinks about climate change and possible solutions.
In short, Shellenberger is NOT a climate change denier. He acknowledges that the earth is warming and that humans are contributing to it. However, he questions whether some of the approaches preferred by the more extreme members of the climate change movement may be counterproductive. The primary theme to his book is that nuclear energy is the best alternative for both reducing greenhouse emissions and allowing third world countries to continue to develop.
In the 1930’s a church group produced a film that would eventually be called Reefer Madness. This film would get new life in the 1950s as an educational film, then again in the 1970s as a satirical cult classic. It was originally produced to frighten parents and teenagers about the dangers associated with smoking marijuana. Shortly after the recreational use of marijuana was introduced to Americans by Mexican farmhands after the 1910 Mexican Revolution, opposition forces began to mobilize. The same inertia that lead to Prohibition was also present regarding marijuana use. If you dig into the sources of the opposition, you’ll find characters like William Randolph Hurst, the famous newspaper tycoon. Hurst owned vast amounts of forests for the production of paper made from wood pulp. There was evidence coming out at the time that hemp might be a better source of pulp for paper than trees, thus threatening Hurst’s forestry investments. Throughout the South, evangelical ministers preached about the evils of marijuana to their parishioners, many of whom were tobacco farmers. Elsewhere, the alcohol industry also saw marijuana as threat and piled on. The misinformation about marijuana use was rampant throughout the 20th century.
While Shellenberger doesn’t mention the propaganda war against marijuana in his book, I couldn’t help but think of Reefer Madness while reading his description of the history of demonization of nuclear power in the U.S. The anti-nuclear film, The China Syndrome, was released in 1979. Its intent, much like Reefer Madness, was to frighten people about the risks of nuclear power plants. Unfortunately, a nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania experienced a partial meltdown only 12 days after the film’s release. Even though the accident caused no injuries or deaths and experts later concluded that the amount of radiation released into the atmosphere was too small to result in discernible direct health effects to local residents, the combination of buzz around the film, activism by Jane Fonda and Ralph Nader, and news reports of the Three Mile Island incident accelerated the growth of the anti-nuclear movement. Like the history of marijuana in the U.S. and extreme climate change activism, the history of anti-nuclear activism is filled with deception, partial truths, and a lot of emotion. And it continues to present day.
In addition to promoting nuclear energy as the missing ingredient in efforts to reduce human effects on global warming, he makes a strong case for allowing developing countries to move up the energy ladder in the same manner that developed countries did, even if it means their adopting energy sources that industrialized nations are attempting to move away from.
For example, countries like The Congo would be much better off building an infrastructure that provides natural gas to its citizens rather than forcing them to continue to use biomass including dung, trees and charcoal made from trees for heat and cooking. But extreme climate activists oppose introducing natural gas (and even hydroelectric power) to places like The Congo, with the unintended consequence of hindering its economic development and keeping residents dependent on less efficient forms of energy.
Europe and North America got wealthy by deforesting for agriculture first, then using coal, then adding oil and its derivatives including natural gas to power industrialization. Now those countries in the West are looking for ways to sustain their economic engines while reducing their carbon footprints.
The most hardcore global warming activists also oppose nuclear power in developed countries even as the science shows it to be perhaps the best alternative to fossil fuels in delivering large amounts of emission-free electricity. They are convinced that developing countries can jump straight from 19th century energy sources to green energy like solar and wind in sufficient quantities to support development. But we saw in The Netherlands that solar and wind can’t power an industrialized nation alone. Nor can it provide enough energy to help a developing nation move from poverty to prosperity. We can’t build a nuclear reactor in The Congo, but we can build one in California, and let The Congo have natural gas until such time as they are able to convert to nuclear.