![Citing potential damage to protected species, a federal judge recently put a crimp in the Administration's forced march toward wind energy. [Credit: Daily Mail]](https://i0.wp.com/www.dougsbriefcase.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/credit-daily-mail.jpg)
Citing potential damage to protected species, a federal judge recently put a crimp in the Administration’s forced march toward wind energy. [Credit: Daily Mail]
The eagles won.
Nurtured by government regulation, hundreds of initiatives promoting renewable energy scattered across 23 federal agencies, $6 billion in federal handouts in 2013 alone, and various indirect costs concealed in utility bills, wind turbines now account for 4 percent of U.S. electricity production. That’s up from just 0.1 percent at the advent of the millennium, reflecting an annual growth rate of nearly 30 percent.
No other government-favored form of energy has seen such prodigious growth. Despite substantial subsidies, solar remains stuck at 0.2 percent of electricity production. Biomass generates a small and declining share of electric power, while outputs from geothermal and biofuels scarcely register.
The Obama Administration is all in for wind, pushing for its share of electrical output to more than double to 10 percent over the next five years. By 2030, the Administration hopes that government intervention will again double wind’s share to 20 percent of electricity production, and help lift it to 35 percent by mid-century.
Those ambitious targets hit an unexpected snag this month when a federal judge voided a plan by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) to issue 30-year permits allowing wind generation companies to “take” – that is to say, kill – unlimited numbers of eagles. Judge Lucy Koh, an Obama appointee, declared that in its zeal to benefit investors in the burgeoning wind industry, the government acted improperly by not undertaking environmental impact studies to assess the toll that wind turbines take on flying creatures.
That toll is substantial. A study published in 2013 in the Wildlife Society Bulletin estimated that wind turbines killed 888,000 bats and 573,000 birds (including 83,000 raptors) in 2012. That number can be expected to grow as wind farms proliferate. By one estimate, the President’s plan for wind energy would require that wind turbines eventually occupy 54,000 square miles, an area about the size of New York State.
That proliferation, however, requires the government to relax its scruples about protecting wildlife. The Obama Administration recognized that almost immediately upon taking office, Koh observed in her ruling. In September 2009, FWS promulgated a rule that for the first time allowed the “take” of bald and golden eagles “where the take is not the purpose of the activity but is a foreseeable consequence of that activity.” Under the rule, wind generation companies could obtain five-year permits.
That wasn’t good enough for the industry. Its lobbyists complained to the Administration that some investors were reluctant to back wind generation projects because they feared that FWS might not renew the permits after the initial five-year period. They pressed the agency to issue 30-year permits – effectively giving the companies license to destroy wildlife throughout the life of a project.
The Obama Administration obliged them in 2012. Koh notes in her opinion that most FWS officials objected to granting 30-year permits, with the rule’s author saying it was a “no-brainer” that it could not be issued without first assessing its environmental effects. She called the decision to promulgate the rule absent such analysis a “train wreck” that “no one could be proud of.”
But weeks before the election, FWS Director Dan Ashe overruled staff recommendations and ordered publication of the rule without calculating its environmental impact. That prompted environmental groups and Indian tribes to file a lawsuit (Shearwater v. Ashe). Government and industry lobbyists responded to the lawsuit by arguing that 30-year permits were “necessary for the future of wind development.”
Koh ruled against them. “The agency has failed to adequately address concerns raised by its own experts,” she wrote. The record, she observed, indicates “that the Final 30-Year Rule may have highly controversial environmental effects” and FWS “has failed to cite expert opinion to the contrary.” Given those facts, Koh concluded, “the agency action should be set aside.”
The case is an illuminating study of the environmental movement’s evolution. The government first acted to protect the bald eagle in 1940 because, the Supreme Court subsequently explained, it is “not a mere bird of biological interest but a symbol of the American ideals of freedom.” Protection against the taking of golden eagles was extended in 1962 because “the golden eagle is an important part of the ceremonies and religion of many Indian tribes.” Both species were protected against “taking” because of the symbolic value they held for humans
That same year, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, a book that profoundly affected popular understanding of the relationship between man and the environment. For Carson, humans were a powerful and dangerous force, whose interventions in nature too often had deleterious, if unintentional, results. Environmentalism took a turn toward the apocalyptic. Henceforth, the prevailing narrative would cast human beings as nature’s enemies. Government’s role was to restrain its citizens from destroying nature, which was viewed as fragile and perpetually menaced by the human species.
This mindset animated the Endangered Species Act. Henceforth, the federal government, whose competence in constitutionally enumerated matters is suspect, would supervise evolution, preserving species that otherwise would vanish. “Survival of the fittest,” a phrase said to distill Darwin’s core thesis, was replaced with “survival of the regulated.”
The now durable notion that man is a toxic force took a further turn with the notion that human beings were posing an existential threat, not merely to certain species, but to the planet itself. Some scientists argued that human activity would precipitate a new Ice Age. But an overwhelming majority of scientists have come to believe that humans are causing global temperatures to rise, effectively threatening to end the world as we know it.
This view has motivated governments in the U.S. and EU to employ a mixture of coercion and inducements to compel the replacement of carbon-based energy production with more costly and less reliable technologies. It was perhaps inevitable that this new environmentalism would at some point clash with its antecedents in the Endangered Species Act.
Nor is it clear how that conflict will ultimately be resolved. Is it more important to preserve birds, raptors, bats and other living things or save the planet itself by replacing fossil-based electricity with wind and solar power (which carries environmental risks of its own)?
The Obama Administration has chosen sides, though one of its judicial appointees has dealt it at least a temporary setback. In advancing the interests of the wind industry, it argued that the concerns expressed by environmentalists about the 30-year rule were “too broad, speculative, or conjectural to lend themselves to meaningful analysis.”
Judge Koh rejected that argument and on good grounds: the carnage inflicted by wind turbines is anything but speculative or conjectural. While the question of balancing the interests of protected species against the presumed dangers of climate change is necessarily complex and subjective, estimating the number of bats and birds shredded by wind turbines, though never precise, at least is tangible.
Climate science, on the other hand, is highly theoretical, based on algorithms that profess to model impossibly complex systems. As such, it is inherently “broad, speculative [and] conjectural.” That doesn’t mean the models are wrong; only that they are abstract and self-reinforcing.
In this respect, climate models resemble econometric models that drive the monetary policies set by the Federal Reserve and other central banks. Those models repeatedly yield the same result: accommodative monetary policy will stimulate economic growth. When the predicted economic growth disappoints despite these accommodative policies, the models tell economists that things would have turned out worse had the central bank not intervened aggressively. And so the Fed and its sister banks continue to double down on low interest rates and bloated balance sheets because their models suggest that they should. The models themselves never are questioned. These hypothetical creations have become substitute realities, a danger for any such model, including those used by climatologists..
Enthusiasms about climate change among politicians of the Left is at least partially attributable to how it reinforces the overarching ideological narrative favored by progressives. The Left has long viewed Americans and Europeans as oppressive and exploitative, unjustly imposing economic, military and cultural hegemony over much of the world’s population.
The theory of global warming extends this narrative from the political and economic to the cosmic. When Americans power their cars and generate electricity from fossil fuels, they heat the planet, melt glaciers, raise sea levels and otherwise wound nature. It is consequently their duty to reduce their reliance on efficient energy sources despite adverse economic consequences, not only to save the planet, but to bring their living standards more into line with the rest of the world.
Curiously, we do not hold non-Western countries to that same discipline. The Obama Administration last year celebrated an environmental agreement with China under which the U.S. committed to reduce its CO2 emissions in 2025 to a level 26–28 percent below 2005 levels, while China pledged to continue increase its CO2 emissions through 2030. Similarly, India made no commitment to reducing CO2 emissions in the agreement it announced with the U.S. last January. Evidently, CO2 is a problem only when it emanates from the U.S. and Europe.
That the climate change narrative fits so seamlessly with the progressives’ tendency to blame America for the world’s ills doesn’t mean it’s untrue. It may very well be that Americans are propelling the planet toward ruin. It is just a bit odd that some major non-Western global producers of greenhouse gases are being held to far less stringent standards than Americans and Europeans.
That may have something to do with the abstract nature of climate change theory. The Chinese and Indian governments, unlike those in the West, are focused on the tangible and material. Their priority is to increase economic growth and raise living standards, which requires massive energy production. They are no doubt a bit perplexed that American and European governments are so eager to burden their own economies by limiting certain forms of energy production. They are in no case inclined to join them.
It may also help explain why many in our own country object to government actions that are based on climate change fears. Virtually every policy recommendation arising from that concern results in economic dislocation for some businesses, some industries, some groups of workers. These real-world effects are typically ignored or dismissed by policymakers, just as Obama Administration officials overlooked the environmental effects of issuing 30-year permits to the wind industry. Authors of such policies seem to believe that lost jobs, failed businesses and dampened economic growth are less important than curbing America’s contribution to climate change.
GOP Presidential aspirant Carly Fiorina recently acknowledged that climate change is a problem, but noted that government responses to it too often result in “destroying people’s lives and livelihood,” while producing little environmental benefit. That no doubt will result in her being labeled a “denier,” someone too dull to appreciate the urgency of reducing reliance on carbon-based energy sources. Then again, her insistence that government balance the concerns of climate change theorists with the practical effects of their policies seems healthy.
As is Judge Koh’s decision to temper climate change enthusiasms with a recognition of their adverse effects.