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November 19, 2009
Exclusive: Great Leaps Forward – Walking in Mao’s Sandals
Historically, recasting scientific problems in political terms invariably compromises science. Now the science of climate change is at risk. There are eerie similarities between Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward intended, in 1957, to industrialize China in the virtual blink of an eye, and the Obama administration’s 2009 attempt to transition immediately from fossil/nuclear to renewable energy generation by introducing mandated increases in energy costs through Cap-and-Trade (aka “cap-and-tax”).
Both have crucial technological requirements, fundamental social engineering, the unshakable belief that decisions taken by governments are bound to improve man’s condition, and no accountability for consequences, predicted or unintended. Today’s windmills and photovoltaic cells, harvesting woefully diffuse wind and solar energy – part of the time and at very high cost – aren’t so different qualitatively from Mao’s backyard blast furnaces that produced brittle, useless steel.
Mao collectivized his population, moving peasants from borderline subsistence farming to disastrously unproductive people’s communes. The Obama administration would artificially increase the price of energy, and consequently everything else, worsening the economic hardship too many Americans already suffer, with nests of urban unemployment already approaching 20 percent.
Early in the Great Leap, Soviet assistance was provided, and farming methods modeled on the genetics ideas of T.D. Lysenko – dense planting – were dictated and touted as an enormous success. The outcome of the bogus genetics and utopian zeal was widespread famine with the loss of at least 30 million lives. No one knows that number for sure, but Lysenko’s environmental genetics long has been discredited.
Current U.S. food production has been affected by the notion that contemporary carbon can replace fossil carbon in the thermodynamically ludicrous ethanol/biodiesel development programs – food versus fuel aftershocks already are being felt in agricultural commodity prices. As population increases, food production will be a dominant need in our future, as it was in 1960s China. Corn and sugarcane support the effort to supplant fossil, with “renewable” liquid fuels, giving little thought to how long agricultural land will remain productive without Haber-produced fertilizer – ammonia derived from atmospheric nitrogen using natural gas. Our energy dreamers constantly confuse renewability with sustainability in agriculture.
Al Gore is the Lysenko of our Energy Leap – his idea of a 10-year transition from fossil/nuclear to renewable energy production is dangerous folly. Indeed, it resembles the continual shortening of the five-year plans that unraveled any hope of rapid Chinese industrialization. Obama’s insistence on immediate energy transition threatens GDP at a critical time when reducing energy availability through taxation restricts economic recovery and growth. GDP and energy use track almost identically. Profligate energy waste is a myth.
Mao conscripted tens of millions of peasant farmers to build roads, bridges, canals, dams and railroads with their bare hands. The Obama administration’s thousands of shovel ready jobs are slated to materialize with the stimulus that is tardy in stimulating, but our jobless will be given shovels.
A peasant revolt eventually forced Mao to reverse course but led to the 1965-68 Cultural Revolution – for Mao, revenge against opposition to the Great Leap and, for the Chinese, loss of another generation. We cannot predict the sequel to our Leap or our rebellion, but the justification for concern becomes more compelling by the day.
This is a cautionary tale that can be examined in exquisite historical detail by anyone willing to take the time. It demonstrates that astonishingly similar ideas can come from remarkably disparate sources. When politically motivated social engineering dominates scientific fact, and politicized science – wrong many times in the past – drives decision making, disaster is in the offing.
Mao’s socialist theory and ideological correctness failed, and the Great Leap Forward was a catastrophe replete with disinformation, deception, and unlimited personal tragedy. Our inconvenient truth is that we face extreme upheaval of economics and governance under climate control schemes advocated by Gore and pushed by the Obama administration. These consequences are possibly reversible only far into future, and they are vastly more severe than doing nothing.
In the Great Leap Forward, there was no need for haste beyond Mao’s personal ambition. The current urgency arguments, the EPA’s unsuccessfully challenged declaration of carbon dioxide an endangerment to the environment, and Obama’s insistence on instant passage of Cap-and-Trade legislation are suspicious and unconvincing.
There is no dispute about the one degree Fahrenheit temperature increase over the past century, but the quantitative contribution of man-made carbon dioxide is uncertain. During the Holocene, there have been larger, rapid temperature excursions to which there could not have been a human contribution. Reduction of anthropogenic carbon emissions may not ameliorate warming to the extent predicted by artfully averaged climate models, and the political consensus to do something about it on a meaningful, international scale is nonexistent — evidenced by the outcome of the recent G-8 and G-20 Summits.
The decision to attack the problem domestically by Cap-and-Trade – already demonstrably ineffective in Europe – when other countries refuse to compromise their fossil energy sources, is economic masochism, not leadership.
Thirty years’ energy research and development time has largely been squandered. Nonetheless, practical solutions in the way we do our “energy business” are out there for technological development. But we still need to use an enormous amount of fossil fuel in the time required to construct the emission-free generation capacity that will support an expanding economy and population.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” George Santayana
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Don Petersen, Ph.D., writes for the Los Alamos Education Group and is past Leader of the Los Alamos National Laboratory's Life Sciences Division. Since Operation Desert Shield, he has served on the Deputy Undersecretary of the Army for Operational Research advisory panel for development of chemical and biological weapons detection and protection equipment.
Reader Comments: Submit Your Comment (1) | Sign Up for FSM Updates!
Obamarx said the "stimulus" was working as intended. He just didn't tell us it was intended to bankrupt the country. In the same way the energy plans are not intended to produce energy or reduce carbon output. They are intended to reduce our economy and extend government control. The comparison with Mao is intriguing. Of course there are other parallels with Mao in this Administration.
posted by: RWinks
Friday, November 20, 2009 at 03:42 PM
