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August 9, 2008
Exclusive: Games Environmentalists Play
Rael Jean Isaac
Nancy Pelosi was appealing to the Democrat Party’s important environmentalist constituency when she explained her refusal to allow the House of Representatives to vote on lifting the moratorium on drilling on the continental shelf and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: “I’m trying to save the planet; I’m trying to save the planet.” Obama appeals to that same base with his current vow “to build a new energy economy,” with energy independence in a few years through subsidies for “renewal alternatives.”
But although alternative energy, above all solar power, is the shibboleth of the environmental movement, what Pelosi and Obama themselves probably fail to realize is that the core organizations of that movement are opposed not just to fuels that leave a “carbon imprint” (supposedly contributing to global warming) but to all large-scale energy development. And until Americans understand the roots of anti-drilling sentiment, which is really anti-energy sentiment, they will be in no position to counter the games self-styled environmentalists play in their war against all energy development.
The roots go back to the 1970s when the political utopians of the 1960s (remember the New Left?) coalesced with the burgeoning environmental movement. Capitalism - above all the energy that fueled it - became the common target. The political utopians of what was broadly known as “the Movement” envisioned transforming society into small scale units practicing participatory democracy. The Institute for Policy Studies, which served as the Movement’s informal hub, summed up the ideal energy system in its proposal for an Encyclopedia for Social Reconstruction: “The energy will be produced and disseminated through small scale technology…We simply would have got rid of most of the extra high voltage wires strung around the country; closed up the coal mines, oil and gas fields; taken down oil refineries and much of the petro-chemical establishment.” The newly emerging environmental movement saw capitalism as problematic because it was compelled to produce ever more products which people did not need to satisfy basic wants, and was thus inherently destructive of the environment.
Although unremembered today, the environmental movement began in an apocalyptic panic with rhetoric and emotion very similar to today’s global warming hysteria. The panic struck in 1970. The earth, up to then a comfortable dwelling place, suddenly was deemed in imminent danger of becoming uninhabitable. “We are already 5 years into the biosphere self-destruct era” read a sign in the Berkeley office of Ecology Action, one of the two hundred environmental groups that mushroomed in the San Francisco area alone during the panic. “The generations now on earth may be the last” read the cover of The Dying Generations, a book of readings published in 1971.
Public emotion reached its peak with Earth Day, on April 22, 1970, in which millions of Americans took part. Congress closed down as its members fanned out to make speeches on the environment to their constituents. Traffic was sealed off in downtown New York and reporters estimated that a hundred thousand people poured into Union Square at 14th Street for exhibits and songs. With the level of sophistication typical of apocalyptic fevers, then mayor John Lindsay addressed the throng, announcing that the issue could be summed up simply: “Do we want to live or die?”
Then, as now, “renewable” energy, above all solar power, was the buzzword. Only the big corporations, it was argued, fearful of losing their profits, stood between the individual and this universally available source of energy. Published in 1973, E.F Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful became scripture for much of the environmental movement. Schumacher called for an end to both fossil fuel and nuclear power and reliance instead on what he variously called “intermediate” and “appropriate” technology. As he put it in the book’s most famous line “Man is small, therefore, small is beautiful.” According to Schumacher, all that man needs to consume he should be able to produce himself from beginning to end or jointly with others in the same locality, preferably from renewable resources.
For politically motivated “Movement” and environmental activists alike, energy was the key to the transformation of society. And since what they rejected was market-controlled industrial civilization, and that civilization ran on energy, it was crucial that energy not only be decentralized, but be in short supply. Amory Lovins, a guru of the movement, declared: “It would be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean cheap abundant energy because of what we might do with it.” (Lovins is still at it, presently touting a hugely expensive hypercar of his design that he says, with typical modesty, “will probably spell the end of the car, oil, steel, aluminum, nuclear and coal industries as we know them.”) Similarly Paul Ehrlich, of zero population growth fame, warned: “Giving society cheap abundant energy…would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.”
Thus both environmental and political utopians were opposed to further development of all forms of economically viable power. The Natural Resources Defense Council brought suit against projects involving nuclear, coal, oil and hydroelectric power. However, for political radicals in the 1970s, the single most important attraction of the environmental movement was its possession of an issue capable of mobilizing masses to action - the issue of nuclear power. Like the Vietnam War (then winding down), the nuclear issue could provide a lever to undermine faith in established authority and to instill a willingness to defy that authority through civil disobedience and even violent action. And nuclear energy had the virtue of serving as the symbol of centralized economic, political and military power - everything that barred the road to achievement of the utopian community of communities of which the political radicals dreamed.
The advantage of nuclear power, as psychiatrist Robert DuPont has pointed out, is that it lends itself to phobic fears. It is strange; its dangers are invisible; there is a long and uncertain delay between exposure to radiation and resulting health problems; and there is an association in the collective consciousness with nuclear bombs. Anti-nuclear activists fostered these fears by jumping from one “what if” scenario to another. What if radiation leaked, what if waste disposal is impossible, what if terrorists steal nuclear material, what if there is a meltdown of the reactor core? (And, a favorite since 9/11, what if terrorists fly planes into nuclear power plants?)
The campaign against nuclear power was hugely successful. Not a single new plant has been ordered in 30 years. While much of the publicity at the time focused on the demonstrations and euphemistically styled “direct action” by ad hoc environmentalist groups with names like Clamshell, Palmetto, Shad, and Bailly, by far the single most effective outfit was contributed by the political utopians – the Institute for Policy Studies’ Government Accountability Project. (Typical of IPS projects, it would eventually spin off from the parent.) Its MO was to exploit the regulatory process and legal system. The game plan was simple: when the plant was virtually complete, GAP would go to the media with accusations of defective welds and inadequate paperwork, known in the trade as “quality assurance,” and demand the Nuclear Regulatory Commission issue a stop-work order until a full investigation of all safety-related issues could be completed. (The NRC never failed to play GAP’s game, dutifully launching last minute investigations in plant after plant even though GAP’s allegations were repeatedly found to be inaccurate or of no consequence for safety.)
GAP’s hope was that the millions in interest the utility would be forced to pay at this last minute stage of construction would force it to abandon the plant before such a study could even be undertaken. While this worked at Cincinnati Gas and Electric’s Zimmer plant (the utility threw in the towel although the plant was 97% complete), in most other cases, while the plant eventually went on line, GAP achieved significant delays that hugely drove up costs, created a climate of fear and distrust of nuclear power among the public to be served by the plant and convinced utilities throughout the country that nuclear plants involved far too much uncertainty, expense and adverse publicity to be worth building.
Given GAP’s small budget (its staff at the time consisted of three poorly paid lawyers and a community organizer), it was enormously cost effective. Merely investigating one relatively minor GAP charge at Consumers’ Midland plant (in Michigan) cost the Nuclear Regulatory Commission $800,000 and overall GAP cost the nuclear industry (and ultimately the consumer) many billions of dollars. This does not count the much larger damage only now becoming apparent from the loss of all the plants that would have been built and now be providing cheap and much needed electricity.
Much of GAP’s success owed to its deceptive persona. Thus in a statement to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission GAP insisted “the Project [GAP] is not an ‘anti-nuclear’ organization”; its purpose is “to prevent health and safety dangers, corruption, fraud and other abuses.” Americans are loath to assign bad faith to groups claiming to pursue the public interest and the media swallowed GAP’s line whole. This was crucial for GAP because local media were essential in arousing the public and politicians, forcing the NRC to bend over backwards in its dealings with GAP. In the hundreds of stories on GAP’s activities that this writer read in local papers near GAP-targeted plants at the time, not one described GAP as an anti-nuclear group. It was an “environmental watchdog group,” a “government watchdog group,” a “national public interest organization.” Even specifically business-oriented national media were no more probing. The Wall Street Journal referred to GAP as “a private watchdog group” and Business Week described it as a “public interest group.”
Writer Peter Metzger coined the term “coercive utopians” to apply to the assorted groups who, in pursuit of their vision of an ideal society, are prepared to undermine our economic system. Decades ago he pointed out that environmentalists are enthusiastic for energy sources as long as they do not exist - and predicted a rapid loss of enthusiasm for alternative energy, including solar power, once it becomes viable on a large scale.
Can any serious person doubt that the organized “environmental base” of the Democrat Party that politicians like Pelosi and Obama seek to appease by opposing drilling and mining will be on the ground running to fight specific proposals for alternative energy? Can anyone believe that environmental organizations will welcome actual implementation of T. Boone Pickens proposal for massive construction of turbines through a Midwest wind corridor that Pickens claims can provide 20% of our electricity needs? Years ago, when the Department of Energy and NASA proposed developing a $2.5 trillion system of solar collection satellites to beam microwave energy from the sun to collectors on earth, environmental groups promptly banded together in a Coalition against Satellite Power Systems. As for nuclear energy, while the environmental movement may divide on the issue because of its current obsession with alleged man-made global warming, there will be plenty of environmentalist groups dreaming up imaginative new ways to halt new construction. In short, any proposal to develop alternative energy on a large scale (whether sensible or crazy boondoggle won’t matter) is bound to meet enormous resistance from the very environmentalists who so enthusiastically promote its virtues.
What can the ordinary citizen, more concerned with saving the family budget than mythical dangers to the planet, do? As The Wall Street Journal editorial of August 6 points out, “just because Mr. Obama’s plan is wildly unrealistic doesn’t mean that a program of vast new taxes, subsidies and mandates wouldn’t be destructive.” At this point, the best thing ordinary citizens can do is insist that they will withhold their vote from any candidate who does not commit himself to work vigorously to remove regulatory and legislative obstacles to drilling on and off shore and to promote all forms of domestic energy production - including solar, wind and water, in so far as they are economically viable.
Note: Some of the material in this essay is drawn from The Coercive Utopians by Rael Jean Isaac and Erich Isaac (Regnery, 1983) and by Rael Jean Isaac “Games Anti-Nukes Play,” The American Spectator, November 1985.
Family Security Matters Contributing Editor Rael Jean Isaac is the editor of Outpost and the author of Madness in the Streets: How Psychiatry and the Law Abandoned the MentallyIll(with Virginia Armat). Feedback: editorialdirector@familysecuritymatters.org.
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