TRANSCRIPT
JASON ROSS: Hi, I’m Jason Ross here with LaRouchePAC, sitting down for an interview with Paul Driessen, the author of Eco Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death and a Senior Policy Adviser for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), an institution devoted to reversing the excesses and errors of environmental regulation.
Now, Paul, this hasn’t always been your relationship to the environmentalist movement. Could you tell us a bit about yourself?
PAUL DRIESSEN: To me, my relationship is much like President Reagan said about the Democratic Party: I didn’t leave the environmental movement—the environmental movement left me. And the gist of it is, we started this movement back in the 60s, when I was still in college. I was part of that initiative. We had major pollution problems, water and air quality, all kinds of issues. And over the years, because we developed new laws, new regulations, new attitudes, new policies, a whole new mindset about the environment, we took care of those problems.
We met our goals and went way beyond them. For example, pollution levels from the early 70s for the main, criteria pollutants, NOx (nitrous oxides) and SOx (sulphur oxides) and all those, are down at least 72%. And power plants emit maybe a tenth of what they used to send out into the environment. Cars are about 95% cleaner than they were when we started all this.
But over the years, as we met those goals and achieved those huge victories, the more radical elements of the environmental movement took over. They had always been there, but they were relegated to the back burner because we were focusing on the real, serious, legitimate problems. So as they moved forward and took the ascendancy, they started pushing views that Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, and I and lot of others view, as being anti-science, anti-technology, anti-reality, anti-evidence, and anti-people.
So that’s when I took my leave. I just decided that the Environmentalist were essentially battling the things I believed in. I think we need technologies to move us forward, to improve people’s living standards and well-being, and reduce deaths.
And we’ve done that here in this country. But there are billions of people in the rest of the world, who still need to have the technologies, the affordable, reliable, carbon-based energy, that we have used to raise our living standards, our health and our well-being way beyond anything imaginable even a hundred or two hundred years ago.
The environmentalists today are denying those technologies and those improved lives, living standards and life spans to the poorest people on the planet. I view that as just absolutely wrong. People are as much a part of this planet as the rats and the lions and every other species. They should not be treated as second-class citizens.
The environmentalists are wrong when they say that we’re no better than any of those other species: that the death of a child in Africa is no worse than the death of Cecil the Lion, and I just can’t buy that. And that means anti-energy, anti-GMO, anti-bio-technology, anti-DDT, anti-pesticide policies, and anti–carbon energy policies are killing literally millions of parents and children in these countries every year.
ROSS: One of the things that these groups sometimes point to, they call the “precautionary principle.” They say that it’s possible that we’re going to face great threats in the future: global warming, climate change, extreme weather, the threats to bird eggshells in the case of DDT. And they say that to avoid these potential threats we have to take action now. What do you say to that?
DRIESSEN: Well let’s start with DDT, eggshells. Professor Joel Bitman, a researcher in Maryland, did the original studies. He concluded that DDT was thinning the eggshells, and that was causing the birds to crush them and kill the embryos, and this was causing a decline in the populations of eagles and other birds. But somebody pointed out that the diet he was feeding these test birds was grossly deficient in calcium.
Well calcium is the main component of eggshells, so Dr. Bitman, being an honest scientist, following the scientific method, went back and he re-did his experiments using the proper feeds, and there was no eggshell thinning because of DDT. When he tried to publish those new findings, Nature and other science magazines refused to accept his new work for publication, because they had already taken a stand, and they were not going to back off on DDT.
So this is just one more example of the lies about DDT, but this brings you into the precautionary principle. They don’t want to use DDT because some environmentalist extremists, people who are anti-pesticides, say there’s a possibility that DDT or its metabolites like DDE might possibly have an impact on lactation in nursing mothers, or on childhood development of the brain cells, and so forth.
They don’t have any evidence that this is happening because they raise the possibility, they say that no technology should be available, should be used, should be implemented, or brought to public access, unless they can prove that technology has none of these adverse, imaginary, imagined, exaggerated effects. They don’t want to talk about the impacts of their policies or the precautionary principle itself, or the denial of these technologies.
So if you take DDT away, a million people, mothers mostly and children, die from malaria every year. So shouldn’t that be factored into the precautionary principle? There you can show a very direct link between the lack of this powerful insect repellent to the deaths of millions of people and the disease of malaria in billions of people over the years. And yet that’s part of the precautionary principle you’re not supposed to ever talk about.
So it’s basically a sledge-hammer that’s used where the environmentalists don’t like a technology, don’t like living standards, don’t want to let people improve their health and living standards. That’s when they bring up that type of precautionary principle. They don’t want it applied to their own policies, which is where it really needs to be applied.
ROSS: Right, or a way to hide behind bad science, by saying “well it might be true.”
The Catholic Church is an institution that many people around the world look to as a defender of the poor and the disadvantaged. Recently, Pope Francis released the encyclical Laudato Si’, which takes up environmental concerns, global warming directly. What impact do you think this has? How do you see the importance of this encyclical?
DRIESSEN: Well it’s certainly been a boost to the climate crisis crowd, the climate crisis industry. Right now they are saying that the climate crisis alarmism industry, coupled with the renewable energy industry, and others that are tied into this whole vernacular about how much carbon-based fuels are affecting earth’s climate—that industry is now judged to be at about 1.5 trillion dollars a year. And you see why they want to take such a hard line on this and keep pushing this particular message.
Pope Francis, contrary to his predecessor, who didn’t buy into the global warming ideas and actually rejected them, Pope Francis has accepted those pretty much hook-line-and-sinker, tied in with what he calls sustainability. He doesn’t like capitalism. He doesn’t like carbon-based energy. He wants to see all of that gone. He agrees with some of the leading voices in the UN, and American environmentalist movement, and the current White House under President Obama, that the United States and the whole world’s economic system needs a total reformation, a total transformation. Our legal system, our constitutional system, our economic system, our energy system, should all be completely upended and replaced with who knows what. They don’t really specify that.
But capitalism, free enterprise, innovation, technology, carbon-based fuels, fossil fuels, have brought the most incredible, significant transformation of the human condition in history: After thousands, tens of thousands of years of human history, over the last couple of hundred years with the industrial revolution, and coal, oil, natural gas, all of a sudden we’ve got living standards, and health and welfare, and lifespans better than we have ever enjoyed in history. The average person in the United States, even people on welfare, are living better than the kings and queens did a hundred, a hundred and fifty years ago.
So when Pope Francis comes in and says that we need to get rid of capitalism, we need to get rid of fossil fuels, we need to get rid of the free-enterprise system, and put a bunch of unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats in charge of everybody’s living standards and lifespans, basically he means that we are going to roll back living standards in the developed world, and we’re going to tell, not we, but rather they, the ruling elites, the unelected forces that he has aligned himself with, are going to tell the world what living standards they’re going to be permitted to have.
Of course the ruling elites will have slightly better, or a whole lot better living standards. They’ll get to travel. They’ll have their air-conditioning. They’ll have their fancy offices, and so forth. But the average person’s supposed to be held back, rolled back. The poor people of he world are going to be told, in the words of John Holdren, President Obama’s Science Advisor, what level of development will be “ecologically feasible” as determined by these ruling elites.
And I just have a problem with that.
ROSS: Yes. Many of the people pushing these policies clearly aren’t living that way.
DRIESSEN: No, they certainly are not.
ROSS: Prince Philip, for example, who lives in several castles hardly seems to be somebody cutting back.
DRIESSEN: I don’t know how many hundreds of thousands of miles he travels very lavishly each year, but he definitely does feel that the rest of the world should live differently.
Al Gore is in the same boat. For several years, he gave around $350 to charity each year—total. The one year when he was a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, he gave his entire share to a charity, but the charity he chose was one of these global warming alarmist groups, whose message has helped enrich Mr. Gore by several million dollars over the next couple of years. So that’s the kind of charity: they believe that charity begins at home, obviously with them.
ROSS: Returning to your examples about how power availability has transformed the lives of people. If you think about Germany where the installed capacity of both solar and wind is over 10 gigawatts each, and the power prices are around—the last number I heard—about 37 cents a kilowatt-hour, dramatically higher than, in fact, about three or four times higher than a typical US rate. You can see the cut-backs that come when you try to implement this policy. What is possible in an economy that doesn’t have energy?
DRIESSEN: Well, you can see what’s possible in an economy that doesn’t have energy by going to a lot of African countries where people basically have nothing. They’ve still got the huts they’ve been living in for centuries, for millennia. They cook and heat with wood and dung and charcoal fires, animal dung. Their babies and infants are strapped on their backs breathing the same polluted smoke from those fires. They have millions of deaths every year from lung infections. Millions more deaths from unsafe drinking water and spoiled food: again, because they don’t have the energy, reliable, affordable, abundant, carbon-based energy that we enjoy and benefit from.
Back to Germany for just a moment. The 37 cents per kilowatt-hour that you’re talking about is the subsidized rate. Take the subsidies out and it’s more like 70 or 80 cents a kilowatt-hour, compared to 8 cents a kilowatt-hour in West Virginia, which is right now 95% reliant on coal. And it’s coal produced in power plants that have scrubbers; very little pollution comes out of them. What you see coming out of the stacks is water vapor and carbon dioxide, and let’s always remember that water vapor comes down as rain and carbon dioxide is plant fertilizer.
Nothing on planet earth would be here, including ourselves and the trees out here, would be here without carbon dioxide. And the more we have in the atmosphere, the better, the faster, the more robustly, plants and crops grow. So those are all things that need to be taken into account, and when you’re telling these countries in Africa, as President Obama has, that we’re not going to provide loans or grants to build fossil fuel power plants, and they need to get by on wind and solar, which are far pricier. It’s energy when it’s available, rather than when you need it.
It’s basically telling them: put a solar panel on your hut, and have a one cubic foot refrigerator, and a light bulb, and a charging station for your cell phone, and that’s the most that we’re going to allow you to develop. Or have a wind turbine for your village: again, energy when it’s available not when it’s needed. And people are going to be kept in those impoverished conditions for the foreseeable future, under those policies. I find that inhumane, a crime against humanity, and just immoral. We can’t allow it.
ROSS: And they describe it under the grotesque name of “appropriate technology.” That’s what they call appropriate for these nations.
DRIESSEN: What they define as appropriate, which doesn’t apply to them.
ROSS: Right. On the political front there is another Conference of Parties conference coming up in Paris at the end of this year. And there is a major push to get an agreement on reducing CO2 emissions at this conference. Do you have any thoughts on this upcoming conference?
DRIESSEN: Well, first of all, whatever is going to come out of it from our perspective here in the United States is going to be a treaty. Not an agreement, not some little scrap of paper, it’s going to be a binding commitment, a binding treaty between the United States and other countries, and with the United Nations, if President Obama gets his way, and gets something like that developed and agreed to by all these various nations.
That means it needs a two-thirds vote by the Senate, it’s not a two-thirds vote of disapproval, but a two-thirds vote of approval. I don’t think that’s ever going to happen and I think we need to let the world know that the United States is not going to become a party to some treaty that binds us and tells us we need to roll back our energy use, our carbon dioxide emissions, and our living standards to satisfy the climate cartel, the climate crisis industry.
I think also you’re looking at a lot of countries that are only going to sign this because they think they’re going to share in this hundred billion dollar a year transfer of wealth from developed countries, or what I call FRCs (Formerly Rich Countries) because we’ve already battered our economies so much with these anti-technology, anti-energy policies. I don’t think that money’s going to be there, number one, but this is what these countries expect, and that’s the number one reason they’re looking to sign an agreement like this. They want what they call climate mitigation adaptation and reparation money.
So, even if the money does come, or even if a portion of that comes, the other thing that the people in these developing countries need to know, the ones that are being held back right now, by all these policies against them building fossil fuel power plants, is that it’s not going to be the average person in these countries that gets any of that money.
That money is going to end up in the pockets and the Swiss bank accounts of the ruling elites. And the average person is going to get nothing. Maybe, as I said, a solar panel on a hut. And they’re going to continue to live pretty miserably and die young, be exposed to the same diseases they are fighting day after day right now. So I don’t think this is going to be a good deal.
Moreover, the way it’s structured, it’s only going to be countries like the United States that will be bound, required to roll back their energy use, or carbon dioxide emissions in their living standards. So countries like China and India and Indonesia, every other country is going to be building coal-fired power plants at the rate of a power plant a week, or faster, and the carbon dioxide levels in the earth’s atmosphere will continue to rise. So even if you believe that carbon dioxide has replaced all the incredibly complex, inter-related, powerful natural forces that have ruled climate change from Earth’s beginnings throughout human history—even if you believe that, the carbon dioxide level in the Earth’s atmosphere is going to continue to increase, and whatever the United States does will have no impact whatsoever on Earth’s climate.
And in fact, even EPA has admitted that the policies it’s jamming down our throats right now, that are killing jobs all over the United States, impoverishing families, raising energy prices—even with all those policies, EPA says that 85 years from now, the year 2100, they will have prevented global warming to the tune of 0.03°F, not even one-tenth of one degree; you can’t even measure this stuff!
So this is what we’re looking at coming out of the Obama Administration in the form of EPA regulations and/or a climate treaty. That’s a bad deal for us. We think the Iran deal is bad. This is just as bad or worse, and it will have repercussions throughout our economy. Poor and minority families are going to get hit the hardest. Blue collar families will see their jobs, their industries wiped out. And again it will only be the ruling classes that benefit from this.
Not a good idea.
ROSS: I’d like to return to your theme about the disgusting immorality of these actions, of telling countries, “No, you can’t develop. You’re not able to live as a full person.” One field of human thought where there are expressed concepts about man’s role in nature, the concept of human identity, is in religion. And Martin Palmer, an aide of Prince Philip’s, had worked with him in 1986, to set up an alliance of conservation and religion, to get religions to accept the idea that human beings were not the center of the world, not that important, just another living species. And he had said that this would have difficulty among Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
He particularly singled out Christianity for mingling of divine and the human and the idea of human beings as a creative force. It’s not accidental in view of these actions, that religion and global warming seem connected in the fact that the global warming alarmists seem to have an almost religious conviction about the proper number of human beings on the planet, the identity of the human race, and what we deserve to have. Any thoughts on this?
DRIESSEN: Yeah, absolutely. Essentially what Palmer and too many others, and even Pope Francis is getting pulled into this maelstrom—they’re trying to replace Judeo-Christianity and other religions with a return to nature worship of Gaia as the earth mother, of nature as a god unto itself. And they reject the real teachings of Christianity and Judaism, and so forth, that man is here obligated to be a responsible steward of Earth and God’s creation, and to use Earth’s and God’s bounteous resources to improve the lot of human beings, to improve the environment.
If you go back a couple of centuries, or you look around the cities in third world countries, you don’t find much in the way of forests. You find degradation, you find pollution, you find waterways and air really polluted by massive amounts of disease; you find people still dying at age 35 or 45 on average, rather than 75 or 85. It’s because they don’t have the kinds of technologies we have developed and made our everyday existence in the United States and Europe.
Just imagine, try to imagine your life without electricity 24/7/365: affordable, abundant for whatever you need it for. Just running your cell phone, your modern day cell phone, your laptop, and so forth. The amount of energy required, not just to charge it, that’s piddling, but to operate the infrastructure, the servers the whole base of knowledge that you’re feeding into that telephone everyday is enormous. You cannot do that with wind and solar power.
Even Google’s top scientists, after spending a couple of years looking into this, finally admitted that fossil fuels were required and that wind and solar were not going to be able to cut it, that not even the Google technology was going to make it with just wind and solar. 1The report by the Google researchers is available here Think about your hospitals, your factories, your small businesses, your malls, your schools, your own house, operating only with wind and solar power.
And keep in mind that the same people that hate fossil fuels, who hate any carbon-based energy, and are crazy about global warming, they also detest nuclear power, hydroelectric, anything that really can provide more reliable affordable energy, they’re against it. They want the energy for themselves, again, but they don’t want other people to have it.
ROSS: One of the precepts you just brought up, of sustainability, presumes that there are certain amounts of resources that exist, that we’re over-exploiting them, that the fruits of the earth are all going to be gathered, and there will be nothing left. What do you think about this concept?
DRIESSEN: Well sustainability has actually become kind of a flip-side of the same global warming cult / climate crisis coin. They are interchangeable. When people have kind of OD’d on global warming or climate change as a mantra, a cause of alarm, then they just shift gears slightly and they’re talking about sustainability.
But it all comes down to the same ruling elites, the same policies, the same anti-energy, anti-technology, anti-modern living standards, ideas, and regulations with that same ruling group in charge of everyone’s life, life spans, living standards, livelihoods, everything we make, grow, ship, eat and do, they want to be able to rule the levels at which that’s allowed, except for themselves.
And reality is that first of all because of the real change in mindset for most people in the developed world, we are conserving more than we ever have, we’re recycling, we’re implementing all kinds of true sustainability practices where we do the best we can to miniaturize a lot of technologies to get more bang for the buck in the amount of water we use, the amount of electricity we use, the aluminum going into aluminum cans for example, that replace the steel cans, then we’ll recycle them.
The manufacturing processes, paper-making processes, all those things have changed so much over the last couple of decades. And the basic philosophy that people hew to today will continue pushing this forward. But to use sustainability or climate change as the excuse for not letting people enjoy modern living standards, or telling people they have to roll their standards back, their life styles, their livelihoods, and their life spans, to roll them back, in the name of protecting earth or Gaia—the notion that we should be telling the poorest people on the planet: This is how much more we will let you improve your living standards because anything more wouldn’t be sustainable, or we can’t afford.
And this what the head of the Mexican Environmental Law Foundation told several of us a few years back: “We don’t really give a damn about the poor,” he said. “We don’t want them to become middle class, because if they become middle class, they become consumers, and that means we have to exploit more resources and that hurts the Earth. So we would rather give them a little more welfare money. Let them improve their living standards just a little bit, but not very much.” And I find that a reprehensible attitude, personally.
ROSS: Are we running out of resources? Is there anything to that concern?
DRIESSEN: You look around and we’ve got a very big planet. We haven’t run out of anything yet. Paul Ehrlich had that famous bet with Julian Simon that the price of resources, that Ehrlich himself chose, would actually go down over the couple of years succeeding the bet, and Ehrlich lost the bet to Simon. Simon said the price was going to go down. Ehrlich said it would go up. And it went down for every one of those, because we found more efficient ways to find and extract those resources.
Fracking, the hydraulic fracturing revolution. Whoever would have dreamed that the United States would be the number one gas-producing, and almost number one oil-producing nation in the world after all the craziness of the 70s with the OPEC oil embargo and President Carter saying, “We all just have to cut out our use of fossil fuels. We’re running out and we face an environmental and resource crisis.” Well, we’ve got an awful lot of those resources, instead of the stories of peak oil and of us running out in a couple of years. (And by the way, the U.S. geological survey first said that we were going to run out oil back in 1923. So this has been around for a long time.)
And the notion that we have hit peak oil has been completely obliterated by the fracking revolution. That’s the real reason the environmentalists don’t like fracking. Peak oil, like the climate crisis and the pollution and precaution—those are the pillars of the environmentalist movement. And we’ve just knocked one of them out from under them, showing that the resources are really first there in the minds of human beings. You first find oil in the mind of the explorer.
Julian Simon always called the creative innovative human mind the “ultimate resource.” To master resources, energy, affordable, reliable, abundant energy, the ultimate resource is our creative minds, and our ability to find new ways to do things, new resources. We didn’t end the stone age because we ran out of stones. And we didn’t end the bronze age because we ran out of bronze.
What we’re going to run out of is the resources that the environmentalists, the Obama Administration, and other people in government, prevent us from getting access to. If they close off the land, and say you can’t go in there and explore; if they close off the ocean areas, and you can’t go in there and explore and drill; if you can’t find the rare earths that I am absolutely positive we have in great abundance right here in the United States, but nobody’s allowed to go into the places where they are likely to be found—if these are prohibited, then you are going to run out.
And the prices are going to go up and people are going to do without. Their living standards, their jobs, everything’s going to be decimated. People are going to die earlier. And it’s not because we are running out resources, it’s because certain groups prevent us from finding and developing the resources that we need for a modern science and technology.
Going back to this whole notion of sustainability. Gro Brundtland, who was Premier of Norway, and became very high in the United Nations, had a definition of sustainability: that current generations should only use the resources that are not going to affect the needs of future generations. Well how do you do that?
I grew up a few miles from the first house in the world to be powered by hydroelectric electricity. I look around at all these technologies, just in my life or the life of my father (who was almost 97 a year ago when he died): airplanes, cell-phones, computers, laptops, the amazing computing power you have in that little bitty cell-phone that you are taking around now, video cameras, everything we make and do and use today, is a brand new technology that basically didn’t exist a few years ago. How do you predict today what technologies future generations are going to have and therefore what raw materials they are going to need to make those technologies? It cannot be done.
So the whole concept of sustainability as a political force, as a political ideology, is stupid and unworkable, and is being used as another hammer to keep people pounded down and prevent them from improving their living standards and well-being.
ROSS: With all the problems in sustainability, environmentalism, and the failure of these power schemes, why is it that this ideology has taken hold? What’s missing in people’s understanding that made this possible?
DRIESSEN: Well I think what’s missing is what the hard-core environmentalists don’t want to talk about, which is the human, the real human and real environmental impacts of their policies, of their ideologies, of the regulations that they’re imposing on us.
I find something really ironic about the people who began this movement out of concern for the well-being of people and the environment, and who wanted free speech on campuses, and free speech in Congress, and free speech in the news media, to be able to advance their ideas and their solutions for what were then very real problems, not these illusory or manufactured or exaggerated problems of today, but really serious environmental pollution problems, people dying of all kinds of diseases still back in even the 60s and 70s, and even today in poor countries around the world from diseases we haven’t even heard of in the United States here, and malaria for example.
But all of a sudden, once they got their message across and we changed our policies and our attitudes, and they took over the universities, and the high schools, and the media, and so forth, all of a sudden free speech is verboten. You can’t have free speech. Kirsten Powers, a commentator with Bill O’Reilly every night, a liberal, has written a book on how the left is silencing free speech and the horrible implications of doing that, whether it’s on our college campuses where some lucky schools get a little 10-foot by 10-foot free speech zone, and everybody else is prohibited from speaking on campus.
You can’t offend anybody, except if you’re part of a certain un-selected groups, you get to be offended by the speech and the attacks all the time, but you can’t offend the protected groups. You can’t bring up inconvenient or uncomfortable issues or questions. That is where a lot of this has gone.
So to me our job is to stand up and not be silenced. And bring up these inconvenient truths, these inconvenient questions, force them to deal with it. Al Gore will not debate anybody on climate change. He won’t even take a question that he has not pre-approved before his little lectures on climate. Hillary Clinton refuses to be interviewed on anything. Barack Obama gets very petulant and petty when somebody asks him a tough question.
And you see this all the way across the environmental movement, the UN, Michael Mann, any of these people that are involved in sustainability, climate alarmism, and so forth, the transformation of the world’s economic system, like Cristiana Figueres, the head of the UN’s Climate Organization—they don’t want to talk about any of these inconvenient, troublesome crimes against humanity that I bring up.
And we need to do this over and over. And we need to tell the stories of the people whose lives are being destroyed, whose children are dying, who themselves are dying, because of these anti-energy, anti-insecticide, anti-fertilizer, anti-GMO policies that are being jammed down their throats by these baby-killers.
These are good technologies. Obviously sometimes you can have a technology that’s abused, or accidents happen. But to say that these technologies should just be eliminated because of that and replaced with who-knows-what or replaced with nothing?
Again the power elites don’t want to give up any of their power, any of their living standards, and life styles, their ability to fly off to Bali or Copenhagen for climate conferences. But they want to tell everybody else they can’t fly. They can’t have air-conditioning. They can’t have modern life-styles and living standards. And they don’t want to be held accountable for any of the mistakes they make or the deliberate harm they cause.
I think it needs a real serious house-cleaning in the UN, the EPA. Let people know what the environmental movement has become. It’s not what they think it was, or what they think it is. It’s a 13 billion dollar US industry, 13 billion dollars a year, just the US environmental groups, funded mostly by corporations that benefit from their hard-core ideologies, or want to protect their public relations image, funded by far-left foundations of billionaires, whose money has often come from forest products, mining, oil and gas, and other industries that now the grandchildren are embarrassed about, so they want to use that money that they inherited to shut down other people’s opportunities to improve their lives and rise from the bottom quintile to the upper levels of our economic system.
So I think there’s a lot of work to be done. But I’m glad you’re doing this and glad we all have an opportunity to stand up and be counted.
ROSS: Paul Driessen, thanks a lot.
DRIESSEN: Thank you, Jason.