Foreword:
It seems nearly everyone wants to advance sustainability principles. The problem is, no one really knows what they are. Real sustainability means responsible conservation and stewardship of natural resources. The public relations variety is mostly image-enhancing fluff. Politicized sustainability – the version that’s all the rage on college campuses and among government regulators – insists that we may meet the needs of current generations only to the extent that doing so “will not compromise the ability of future generations to meet their needs.”
The problem with this infinitely malleable definition is that it requires us to predict both unpredictable future technologies and their raw material demands. Even worse, we are supposed to protect those future needs even if it means ignoring or compromising the undeniable needs of current generations – including the needs and welfare of the most impoverished, politically powerless people on Earth today. That’s why this irrational, unworkable, environmentally destructive idea deserves to land in history’s trash bin.
Politicized sustainability threatens planet and people
It drives anti-fossil fuel agendas and threatens wildlife, jobs, and human health and welfare
Guest essay by Paul Driessen
Sustainability (sustainable development) is one of the hottest trends on college campuses, in the news media, in corporate boardrooms and with regulators. There are three different versions.
Real Sustainability involves thoughtful, caring, responsible, economical stewardship and conservation of land, water, energy, metallic, forest, wildlife and other natural resources. Responsible businesses, families and communities practice this kind of sustainability every day: polluting less, recycling where it makes sense, and using less energy, water and raw materials to manufacture the products we need.
Public Relations Sustainability mostly involves meaningless, superficial, unverifiable, image-enhancing assertions that a company is devoted to renewable fuels, corporate responsibility, environmental justice, reducing its carbon footprint – or sustainability. Its primary goal is garnering favorable press or appeasing radical environmental groups.
Politicized Sustainability is the untenable, even dangerous variety. It relies on ideological assertions and theoretical models as an alternative to actual outside-our-windows reality and evidence. Like “dangerous manmade climate change,” its real purpose is gaining greater agitator and government control over people’s energy use, lives, livelihoods, liberties and living standards. It reflects an abysmal understanding of basic energy, economic, resource extraction, manufacturing and human rights realities.
The most common definition is that “we may meet the needs of current generations” only to the extent that doing so “will not compromise the ability of future generations to meet their needs.”
Among other alleged human wrongdoing doing, Political Sustainability thus reflects the assertion that we are rapidly depleting finite resources. Therefore, we must reduce our current needs and wants in order to save those resources for future generations. At first blush, it sounds logical, and even ethical.
However, under sustainability precepts, we are supposed to predict future technologies – and ensure that today’s resource demands will not compromise the completely unpredictable energy and raw material requirements that those completely unpredictable future technologies will introduce. We are supposed to safeguard the assumed needs of future generations, even if it means ignoring or compromising the undeniable needs of current generations – including the needs, aspirations, health and welfare of the most impoverished, malnourished, disease-ravaged, energy-deprived, politically powerless people on Earth.
For thousands of years, mankind advanced at a snail’s pace. Then, as the modern fossil-fuel industrial era found its footing, progress picked up rapidly, until the speed of change became almost exponential. How today is anyone supposed to predict what might be in store ten, fifty or a hundred years from now?
Moreover, as we moved from flint to copper, to bronze, iron, steel and beyond, we didn’t do so because mankind had exhausted Earth’s supplies of flint, copper, tin and so forth. We did it because we innovated. We invented something better, moreefficient, more practical. Each advance required different materials.
Who today can foresee what future technologies we will have … and what raw materials those future technologies will require? How we are supposed to ensure that future families can meet their needs, if we cannot possibly know what those needs willbe?
Why then would we even think of empowering activists and governments to regulate today’s activities – based on wholly unpredictable future technologies, lifestyles, needs and resource demands? Why would we ignore or compromise the pressing needs of current generations, to meet those totally unpredictable future needs?
“Resource depletion” claims also fail to account for new technologies that increase energy and mineral reserves, reduce their costs – or decrease the need for certain raw materials: copper, for instance, because lightweight fiber optic cables made from silica (one of Earth’s most abundant minerals) can carry thousands of times more information than a huge bundle of copper wires that weigh 800 times more.
In 1887, when Wisconsin’s Hearthstone House became the world’s first home lit by hydroelectric power, no one could foresee how electricity would come to dominate, enhance and safeguard our lives in the myriad ways it does today. No one could envision the many ways we generate electricity today.
120 years later, no one predicted tiny cellular phones with superb digital cameras and more computing and networking power than a big 1990 desktop computer. No one expected that we would need so much cadmium, lithium, rare earth metals and other raw materials to manufacture thousands of wind turbines.
No one anticipated that new 4-D seismic, deepwater drilling and hydraulic fracturing technologies would find and produce so much oil and natural gas that today we still have at least a century’s worth of these vital energy resources – which “experts” had just told us we would run out of in only a few more years.
And yet, we are still supposed to predict the future 50 or 100 years from now, safeguard the assumed needs of future generations, and ignore the clear needs of current generations. We are also supposed to presume that today’s essential natural resources have to last forever. In reality, they only have to last long enough for our creative intellects to discover real, actually workable replacements: new deposits, production techniques, raw material substitutes or technologies.
Of course, all of this is irrelevant to Politicized Sustainability dogma. That doctrine focuses on ridding the world of fossil fuels, regardless of any social, economic, environmental or human costs of doing so. And regardless of whether supposed alternatives really are eco-friendly and sustainable.
For example, mandated U.S. ethanol quotas eat up 40% of this nation’s corn, grown on over 36 million acres of cropland, to replace 10% of America’s gasoline. Corn ethanol also requires billions of gallons of water, and vast quantities of pesticides, fertilizers, tractor fuel and natural gas … to produce energy that drives up food prices, damages small engines, gets one-third fewer miles per gallon than gasoline – and during its entire production and use cycle emits just as much carbon dioxide as gasoline.
Imagine replacing 100% of US gasoline with corn ethanol. How would that in any way be sustainable?
Mandated, subsidized wind energy requires millions of acres for turbines and ultra-long transmission lines … and billions of tons of concrete, steel, copper, rare earth metals and fiberglass. The turbines’ subsonic noise and light flicker create chronic health problems for susceptible people living near them, and kill millions of birds and bats annually – to produce expensive, intermittent, unreliable electricity that must be backed up by dozens of fossil fuel generators or billions of (nonexistent) land- and resource-intensive battery arrays.
Meanwhile, American and Canadian companies are cutting down thousands of acres of forests and turning millions of trees into wood pellets that they truck to coastal ports and transport on oil-fueled cargo ships to England. There the pellets are hauled by truck and burned in place of coal, to generate electricity … so that England can meet its renewable fuel targets. How is this sustainable – or “climate friendly”?
Why not just build the fossil fuel power plants … mine for coal and frack for natural gas to fuel them – or build more nuclear power plants – and forget about the ethanol, wind turbines, wood pellets and other pseudo-renewable, pseudo-sustainable false alternatives … until something truly better comes along?
Meanwhile, more than 1.2 billion people still do not have electricity. Another 2 billion have electrical power only sporadically and unpredictably. Hundreds of millions get horribly sick, and five million die every year from lung and intestinal diseases that are due to breathing smoke from open fires … and not having refrigeration, clean water and safe, bacteria-free food.
As Steven Lyazi has noted, these people simply want to take their rightful, God-given places among Earth’s healthy and prosperous people. Instead, they’re being told “that wouldn’t be sustainable.” They’re being told they must be content with a few wind turbines near their villages and little solar panels on their huts – to charge cell phones, pump a little water, power a few light bulbs and operate tiny refrigerators.
Politicized Sustainability is irrational, unjust, inhumane, eco-imperialistic and environmentally destructive. It is especially harmful to the world’s poor. It’s time to rethink and overhaul this insanity.
Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org), and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power – Black death and other books on public policy.
the word gives it away “sustainable” Meaning causing little or no damage to the environment and therefore able to continue for a long time.
So it asks two questions do we have a lot of the stuff now and reasonably can we see more that we can find or use and is it reasonable to think in the time we have while using that stuff we will find a better or preferable alternative.
Witness stone in the stone age, whales for oil lamps, and likely coal within a generation.
not some cloaked watermelon story of green on the outside and red on the inside.
China will lead the way with nuclear.
I do not see how the definition of “real sustainability” has any notion of sustainability in it. Only the
“politicised” definition i.e. meeting our current needs in a way that doesn’t stop future generations from
meeting theirs”, seems to agree with the common sense notion of sustainability. Something is sustainable if it can go on for the foreseeable future. The excellent book “sustainability with the hot air” gives as a working definition that an energy source is sustainable if it can last for 1000 years. This at least gives a definition
that can be used. The notion of “real sustainability” presented above does not allow anyone to decide whether or not something is sustainable – or alternatively it could be used to say that everything is sustainable.
The rest of Paul’s essay seems like an excuse in wishful thinking — i.e. we can do what we like today
because someone at some point in the future will discover a magical wand that will make everything better.
That is not sustability it is just sticking your head in the sand.
Interesting definition. Although I prefer nuclear energy, the ancient Romans used coal for heating already in 753 BC–476 AD. So that’s good then.
The whole idea is to pick a number that makes your particular delusion work and run with it.
It makes sense to let the future worry about the future’s problems while we worry about ours.
The idea that the future will have no more options than we do today is about as dumb a idea as man has ever come up with.
Germonio,
One lifetime – mine – that’s all I have to worry about. Everybody else before me did the same, and all that follow me will as well, if they are smart. All this endless hand-wringing about the future is just stupid.
“Sustainability” is still appropriate in the context of the built environment, but even there, the subject has been degraded by the “Unsustainables” eg the ones who are simply able to throw vast amounts of money into their projects for the purpose of virtue signalling. This is why I used to promote the concept of “sustainability for the rest of us” eg it has to be applicable to all of us, not just the <1%. I can still get clients to do things that make sense, but I avoid using the word sustainable.
A good article in principle…yet even you miss the boat on sustainability. Your article is critical but lacks insight; accurate on facts but fails to fully understand those facts; and thus lacks the wisdom to address the problems. I applaud the sentiments but not the critical thinking.
Sustainability ? . the catch cry of the Greens in New Zealand .Most of them don’t know what this means .Our farming systems in New Zealand are pasture based and the climate is mild enough to not have to house livestock in most regions during winter .If any of you have traveled through New Zealand you would have seen the steep green hills that we farm .Meat and wool and some dairy production off land far to steep to cultivate or use for anything else except forestry .Very little fossil fuel is used until the animals go to market and our farmers are some of the most efficient in the world. The Green party are calling for an emissions trading scheme to tax farmers for methane emissions from farmed livestock and the money would be passed on to foresters as carbon credits .At this time I am not aware that any country is taxing their farmers for methane emissions from livestock and a tax would be a direct cost on farming and cannot be passed on as 90 % of our produce is exported to the world .It is claimed that our country of 4.6 million people feed 45 million people in other countries .The Greens are anti farming and they don’t realize where their food comes from .They have no idea how it gets to the supermarket .
Conservatism is true sustainability. I do what my granddad did, because it got me here.
Period.
You may be doing what he did, but I doubt you are doing it in the same way.
The sustainability crisis of the end of the 19th century was horse manure. The projections seem to be realised in some capitals nowadays, figuratively speaking of course.
current sustainability practises are the recipee for stagnation. We have to admit that we don’t know the future. Progress is improving the presence. Our ancesters also never knew the future when they digged peat , coal and pumped oil and gas. Religion always took care of these “existential fears” by declaring that 1. men work for the Glory of the Lord but 2. the future was in God’s hand. Translated for atheists: we do our very best , have faith in human ingenuity but are by no way responsible in the long term. Secularisation however crushed this convenient firewall against existential fears. The moral compass switched from the church to the environmental organisations with exploit human fears with geat success.
What an absolute load of BS this article is – basically, it’s saying ‘let’s keep the status quo in terms of burning fossil fuels so that the present generation can continue to preserve their comfortable lifestyle – at the expense of future generations.’
Writers like this should be confined to the dinosaur pile. The only viable power source – other than renewables – is nucleur. Put more of this into the equation and you can start to phase out fossil fuels that pump millions of CO2 particles into the atmosphere every year.
This is the way forwards my fossil fuel-loving advocates: https://mankindsdegradationofplanetearth.com/green-power-and-technological-innovation-2/
I have never met a fossil fuel loving advocate that was also anti nuclear. On the other hand, it is rare that I meet an anti CO2 person who is pro nuclear. My conclusion is that ‘green’ advocates in general are afraid of any complexity of thought, and that is why they like wind and solar.
With the exception of Ted Cruz and some other Republicans, most politicians align themselves with the simple minded folks, and we truly have a dumbed down society.
google ‘pro nuclear greens’ and you will find a whole heap of them…
I would not call myself anti-nuclear, but I am very definitely not pro-nuclear, unless a FAIL-SAFE technology can be developed. Then I would be very much for it. And I am very much pro-fossil fuel. Civilization has ridden to the point is at on that wave, and nothing at this point can replace it.
A whole heap does not prove that they are not rare.
Even without fail-safe, whatever that means too you. Nuclear is still very, very, safe.
Examples of not fail-safe are Chernobyl and Fukushima. In other words, meltdowns that occurred because of man’s stupidity (e.g., Chernobyl – carelessness; Fukushima – .greed). Man will always act stupidly (eventually), so that needs to be removed from the equation.
Anthropogenic fears seem to trigger a positive feedback loop. Searching “or build more nuclear power plants” might help you out of the vicious circle.
“This is supposed to be a rational objective website.”
So why are you posting your emotional, alarmist, scientifically illiterate bedwetter drivel on it, Watermelon boy?
The Guardian is way over there on the Left.
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Damn…
Missed!
The author talks about people in developing countries still cooking over open fires and fossil fuels being the solution to providing them with electricity.
Completely wrong and showing a lack of understanding of his subject. This is the solution being implemented on the ground:
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20171009-rural-rwanda-is-home-to-a-pioneering-new-solar-power-idea
What makes you believe Rwamagana district in Rwanda represents the situation in Africa, let alone the world?
http://www.oecd.org/dac/stats/documentupload/DAC%20List%20of%20ODA%20Recipients%202014%20final.pdf
It’s a very good representative start I would say and disproves this author’s claims
http://www.africaguide.com/image/maps/africa_map.png
If he’s wrong in one place, that proves he’s wrong everywhere.
Is that really the logic you want to stick with?
Why do you want to limit Africans to cooking only when the sun shines? Is that what you want for yourself?
This is a good start, but it hardly disproves the author’s point. The BBC article mentions replacing a few candles with lights, but I doubt these systems are replacing the open fires for cooking.
Bboxx’s own website makes it clear that the limited reach and unreliability of the grid combined with low energy needs make Rwanda the low hanging fruit for this market. Customers in hotter and colder regions would need considerably more power, as would customers wanting refrigerators or cooking appliances.
From Wikipedia:
“Rwanda has a temperate tropical highland climate, with lower temperatures than are typical for equatorial countries because of its high elevation.[128] Kigali, in the centre of the country, has a typical daily temperature range between 12 and 27 °C (54 and 81 °F), with little variation through the year.”
So you think a partial solution in Rwanda is going to solve the energy needs throughout the developing world? You’re the one that is “Completely wrong and showing a lack of understanding of his subject.”
Very few places enjoy the benefits of high altitude equatorial sunshine and a temperate climate (pretty well ideal for solar power.)
Somebody help me out here. What’s the cross sectional equivalent of ‘linear thinking in a cyclical world’? Homogeneous thinking in a heterogeneous world just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
Ivan,
I have been in a THIRD would country,the Philippines where they often cooked over fires,even while they have electricity for lights.
They lack electrical power production,where black outs are common outside of Manila,the natives at Camiguin Island have a lot brownouts in parts of the island,where you can see it coming when the few lights in the area starts going up and down in brightness,then plop to nothing after 15-30 seconds.
I was going to do a few blockquotes of what Ivan said and others’ responses, but decided that he’s provided enough virtual solar BS solutions to cook enough dung-fueled meals for everyone on the planet.
This is supposed to be a rational objective website. I suggest you keep emotional verging on ranting ones like this to yourself.
Well then let us all sit in the dark and shiver, so that future generations can…sit in the dark and shiver.
Nope my children will be enjoying my nice warm brightly lit house from my solar panels and wind turbine and may be hole in the ground heating system. Fossil fuels are going to take a long time to phase out and I don’t think they will ever be phased out completely but will remain part of the energy mix but at a lower proportion than today.
You really are delusional, aren’t you.
If you are relying on wind and solar, sitting in the dark shivering will be your lot, more often than not.
https://youtu.be/AdNvmIfyQPY explains
1) Why would we ever want to stop pumping CO2 into the atmosphere? It’s making the world a much better place.
2) We’ve got enough fossil fuels to last somewhere between 500 and 1000 years, probably more.
3) Considering how technology has advanced during the last 100 years, I’m not going to hazard any guesses as to what technologies will be available 500 or 1000 years in the future so I’m not going to sit around and worry about what they are going to be needing.
In reply to Ivankinsman .This is not BS
What you and the Greens fail to realize that wind and solar electricity cannot deliver the base load that powers our civilization as it has developed to this point in time .If the greens want civilization to advance they have to embrace nuclear power as there is enough uranium to power the world for 5000 years .If you want to go back to the early 20th century that I was brought up in that’s OK but are you and the greens ready .
I remember electricity coming to our part of New Zealand in 1948 and a refrigerator and washing machine arriving .How do you think my parents managed before this .Where do you think the power comes from to even manufacture these things that save so much time and food .It sure beats taking food down to the creek to keep it cool. as my mother had to do in the summer .And lighting a fire under a copper to wash the clothes in
The greens live in fantasy land .Many countries do not grow enough food to feed their population therefore it has to be transported around the world and that is not going to change any time soon
.The majority of the green supporters in New Zealand live in the cities and if they had to perform heavy manual labour and work long hours that farmers still do they might change their stance.
They have a cost life and little idea how their food gets to the supermarket.
They have a cosy life
So true! RE is a dead end road, promising dramatic loss of prosperity. Windfarms and solar panels only may be produced thanks to fossil fuels.
Ivan, as usual you didn’t properly address the article you called B.S.
You didn’t address the varied impacts of sustainability at all,nor this part in the article,
“For thousands of years, mankind advanced at a snail’s pace. Then, as the modern fossil-fuel industrial era found its footing, progress picked up rapidly, until the speed of change became almost exponential. How today is anyone supposed to predict what might be in store ten, fifty or a hundred years from now?
Moreover, as we moved from flint to copper, to bronze, iron, steel and beyond, we didn’t do so because mankind had exhausted Earth’s supplies of flint, copper, tin and so forth. We did it because we innovated. We invented something better, moreefficient, more practical. Each advance required different materials.
Who today can foresee what future technologies we will have … and what raw materials those future technologies will require? How we are supposed to ensure that future families can meet their needs, if we cannot possibly know what those needs willbe?
Why then would we even think of empowering activists and governments to regulate today’s activities – based on wholly unpredictable future technologies, lifestyles, needs and resource demands? Why would we ignore or compromise the pressing needs of current generations, to meet those totally unpredictable future needs?”
You ignored all that to push your silly sustainability babble.
Right on Ivan! 🙂
Thank you Paul Driessen – an excellent essay.
Regards, Allan
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/09/23/the-evils-of-climate-enthusiasm/#comment-2618246
[excerpt]
“It is the obligation of responsible, competent professionals to blow-the-whistle on this (global warming) sc@m, and to encourage the availability of cheap, reliable, abundant energy systems for humanity. This is especially true for the elderly and the poor worldwide, and for the struggling peoples of the developing world.”
Sustainability is a socialist plan for the world.
Below is the link to the report that started it all, “Our Common Future” released in 1987. There are over two hundred mentions of the word “sustainable” in it:
http://www.un-documents.net/our-common-future.pdf
The chairman of this report was Gro Harlem Brundtland. She is a vice president in SocialistInternational.org:
http://www.socialistinternational.org/viewArticle.cfm?ArticleID=126
So where does this “sustainable” movement come from? From what I’ve found, the Rockefeller Foundation. You can see this in their 1983 Rockefeller Brothers Fund Annual Report (and 85, and 86 reports):
From their 1983 report:
“A grantee must also be engaged in work that fits generally within the Fund’s new program: Global Interdependence, with specific emphasis on sustainable resources management or on security.”
pg 16
“As a logical extension of its work, the Institute will prepare an annual report measuring progress, or lack thereof, in the creation of a sustainable global society.”
pg 25
http://www.rbf.org/sites/default/files/1983-AR-web-optimized.pdf
Rockefeller money helped support this report.
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Another interesting tidbit: Anybody ever hear of the “Three E’s” of sustainability: economy, ecology, and equity”?
http://www.sustainabilitycoalition.org/the-three-es-of-sustainability/
Did if come from the 1986 Rockefeller Brothers Report?
“To encourage more efficient and renewable use of natural, human, and man-made resources, in an approach that blends social, economic, and ecological concerns.”
pg 13
http://www.rbf.org/sites/default/files/1986-AR-web-optimized.pdf
Opps, meant to write “Rockefeller money helped support the “Our Common Future” report.