Costs of Environmentalism  by Roger King  

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Costs of Environmentalism
3. Conclusion

Introduction

Costs of Environmentalism

Why I Left Greenpeace   by Patrick Moore  April 22, 2008   Science shows that adding chlorine to drinking water was the biggest advance in the history of public health, virtually eradicating water-borne diseases such as cholera. And the majority of our pharmaceuticals are based on chlorine chemistry. Simply put, chlorine is essential for our health. ...   Despite science concluding no known health risks – and ample benefits – from chlorine in drinking water, Greenpeace and other environmental groups have opposed its use for more than 20 years.

Greenpeace now has a new target called phthalates (pronounced thal-ates). These are chemical compounds that make plastics flexible. They are found in everything from hospital equipment such as IV bags and tubes, to children's toys and shower curtains. They are among the most practical chemical compounds in existence.

Phthalates are the new bogeyman. These chemicals make easy targets since they are hard to understand and difficult to pronounce. Commonly used phthalates, such as diisononyl phthalate (DINP), have been used in everyday products for decades with no evidence of human harm. DINP is the primary plasticizer used in toys. It has been tested by multiple government and independent evaluators, and found to be safe. 

Unintended Global Consequences   by Diane Katz  April 22, 2008     Millions of acres of rainforest are fast disappearing as farmers in South America, Asia and elsewhere rush to clear land for cultivation. Among the culprits is government subsidization of corn-based ethanol — a supposed antidote to climate change. U.S. subsidies are expected to top $5 billion this year, which is prompting American farmers to devote more land to corn in place of soybeans. Consequently, their counterparts around the globe are clearing acreage to capitalize on higher prices for the displaced crops.

A cholera outbreak in Latin America killed more than 10,000 people and infected up to a million more after the government of Peru limited chlorination of the public water supplies — as demanded by Greenpeace and other environmental activists. The war on chlorine was abetted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which erroneously associated chlorination of water with an increase in cancer risk.

Millions of pounds of apples were left to rot and family orchards were lost to foreclosure following reports that Alar, a common ripening agent, was the most potent cancer-causing compound in the food supply. The American Council on Science and Health later revealed that a child would have to drink 19,000 quarts of apple juice every day for the rest of their life to consume the same amount of Alar fed to mice during tests for cancer.  

Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate by  Fred Singer with the Heartland Institute in 2008   The rise in environmental consciousness since the 1970s has focused on a succession of ‘calamities’:  cancer epidemics from chemicals, extinction of birds and other species by pesticides, the depletion of the ozone layer by supersonic transports and later by freons, the death of forests (‘Waldsterben’) because of acid rain, and finally, global warming, the “mother of all environmental scares” (according to the late Aaron Wildavsky). 

Endangered Species Act

1. The Endangered Species Act doesn't recover endangered species.  In the 33 years the Endangered Species Act has been on the books, just 34 of the nearly 1,300 U.S. species given special protection have made their way off the "endangered" or "threatened" lists.  Of this number, nine species are now extinct, 14 appear to have been improperly listed in the first place, and just nine (0.6% of all the species listed) have recovered sufficiently to be de-listed.  This amounts to a recovery rate of less than one percent.
2. The Endangered Species Act punishes landowners for good environmental stewardship.  Private property owners who care for their land, and maintain habitat for endangered species, find themselves subject to severe land use restrictions. This creates a perverse incentive for landowners to rid their property of species and habitat in an effort to avoid land use restrictions and potentially devastating losses in property value that accompany them.  This is detrimental to the recovery of rare plants and animals, considering 75 percent of threatened and endangered species occur on private land.
3. The Endangered Species Act is very costly.  It is estimated that the Endangered Species Act costs Americans billions of dollars annually.  Many social costs attributable to the ESA's regulatory burden are ignored by government agencies when they account for the Act's price tag.  Some of these include:  lost jobs and reduced business activities; increased public service costs; reduced tax revenues due to lost business income, lost personal income, and property devaluation; and increased public assistance costs to those individuals who lose their jobs.

Wetlands

1. The United States is gaining wetlands, not losing them.  According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, net wetland acreage grew at a rate of 26,000 acres per year between 1997 and 2001, and in 2002 and 2003, net wetland gains averaged 72,000 acres per year.
2. The rate of wetland loss began to decline before the federal government began intensively regulating wetlands under the Clean Water Act.  It is estimated that prior to World War II, net wetland losses totaled about 800,000 annually.  In the 1950s and 60s, net wetland losses declined to an estimated 458,000 acres per year.  In the 1970s, wetland losses plunged further to an estimated 290,000 acres per year.
3. Wetlands regulations are expansive and onerous.  111.5 million acres of land in the U.S is currently covered by federal wetland regulations.  This is equivalent to a landmass larger than the state of California.  Under current federal law, landowners are not compensated when they lose the right to use their property due to wetlands regulations.  According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, this has resulted in approximately $162.6 billion dollars in lost development rights.

1. Two decades of the world's most stringent environmental regulations have made Germany, Europe's largest economy, increasingly energy dependent on Russia, the world's largest exporter of natural gas.  ...
2. In the aftermath of the Soviet Union's collapse, Germany's electricity sector enjoyed energy independence, thanks to extensive coal reserves and a large nuclear industry.   ...
3. Coal has been targeted because its combustion releases the most greenhouse gas of any fossil fuel  ...
4. Nuclear power emits zero greenhouse gas, but most environmentalists oppose it because the waste it produces is difficult to store.  ...
5. Germany could have supplied much of its own natural gas needs with domestic reserves from the northwestern state of Niedersachsen, home to 9 trillion cubic feet of gas. However, this energy is off-limits because environmental regulations have curtailed the complete exploration and development of the area.  ...
6. Instead, Germany has met its growing demand with natural gas imports from Gazprom, a state-owned enterprise that has a legal  ...  monopoly on all natural gas exports from Russia. Imports have skyrocketed since the Cold War, and Russia now supplies more than 40 percent of German gas consumption.  ...
7. So it seems that German is still using the same amount of energy that it normally would but has given up its independence to the Russians as a result of Environmentalism.

Avoiding A Blackout  by Investor's Business Daily  October 14, 2008   If the nation is to avoid a repeat of the 2003 blackout, its power supply desperately needs to be boosted through new construction of nuclear-, coal- and gas-fired plants. NextGen estimates that 120 gigawatts of new generation, enough to power as many as 48 million homes, will be needed to provide a 15% reserve margin. That's the rough minimum needed to ensure that the system is reliable.  But that's only half the fix. Additional electricity is worthless if it can't be distributed to users. NextGen estimates the U.S. needs more than 14,500 miles — that's New York to Los Angeles and back three times — of transmission lines by 2016 to relieve congestion that will inevitably cause power outages if the issue isn't addressed.  ...  "The single biggest threat to system reliability," says the NextGen report, "is opposition from well-funded environmental groups that oppose and file lawsuits against virtually every new electricity project proposed."   Link

Conclusion