Welcome to environMENTAL
Around 3 billion people on earth lack access to reliable electricity, sufficient clean water, nutritious food and basic sanitation, and live off less than $3 per day. Their poverty is in great part a direct consequence of lack of access to affordable, reliable, abundant, on-demand electricity.
Western nations have spent TRILLIONS of dollars on “climate change” policy since the Kyoto Protocol was signed by Europe + 37 nations in 1997. With the “Inflation Reduction Act” of 2022, U.S. taxpayers have now spent or committed almost three-quarters of a trillion dollars on climate change policy since 1999.
For almost two decades, we have asked ourselves, “what good could have been done for the lot of humanity worldwide with this amount of money”?
As a result of western climate change policy, the world has embraced a rapid transition toward the goal of “net zero” carbon emissions relying on ”renewable” energy. Wind and solar energy, battery storage, biofuels and biomass are the foundations of this transition. Nuclear energy, the only presently viable zero-emissions form of on-demand utility-scale electricity generation, is not.
At scale, there is no present liquid transportation fuel alternative to petroleum hydrocarbons. According to a November 2022 U.S. Argonne National Laboratory report, the cumulative miles driven by all plug-in electric vehicles in the U.S. in 2021 offset approximately 690 million gallons of gasoline. For some perspective, according to that same report, the U.S. consumed approximately 369 million gallons per day in 2021.
We watched all of this evolve and recognized patterns emerging almost twenty years ago that could be more harmful to the world’s citizens than the problems they were trying to solve.
The thesis of environMENTAL is simple: Those who imposed the transition to “renewables” on the world did so without understanding science (physics and economics), resource constraints and the potential unintended consequences of their actions. We fear this could be a human prosperity disaster in the making and an enormous waste of resources, will achieve virtually nothing to alter the trajectory of climate change, will cause more harm to the environment than it reduces, and threatens to condemn the world’s poorest to misery.
This requires critical examination.
environMENTAL is a regular publication dedicated to that task.
“Who are you?” you may be asking.
The team at environMENTAL consists of environmental industry engineers, geologists, geophysicists, risk management, finance, legal and other relevant professionals. Our combined industry experience exceeds 200 years.
We came of age at the dawn of the environmental movement in western civilization: Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring”, Paul Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb”, and notorious environmental disasters like Love Canal, Times Beach (Missouri), and the Cuyahoga river (Ohio) on fire. We’ve spent our adult lives cleaning up environmental threats caused by industrialization in the 20th century at the most hazardous and complex sites in the U.S. and abroad.
Our experience informs everything we write, the hard questions we’re not afraid to ask, and the positions we take.
You may be curious about our logo. Does it imply all “environmentalists” are crazy and should be in straightjackets? Or instead that getting environmental and energy policy wrong has consequences for humanity that could be like confining it to a straitjacket? Read our work. Judge for yourself.
We want environMENTAL to become the preferred public square for a badly needed, civil, healthy, detailed debate on environmental and energy policy. That means we especially welcome and need voices who disagree with us. If you think we’re off-base, explain to us cogently where and why in the comments section of our posts.
Science does not yield to ideology. Proper balance in environmental and energy policy could be the inflection point between prosperity and misery for billions.
Welcome to environMENTAL. We’re going to try to help humanity get the right balance.
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