Sunday, August 5, 2018

U.S. Achieves Biggest CO2 Reduction by Any Nation in the World in 2017

IER-light-noletters-75x38.pngInstitute for
Energy Research

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No other nation in the world has accomplished as much as the US in CO2 reduction, thanks to the shale revolution and the avoidance of the renewables trap.

The United States announced its intentions to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement last year, but still reduced its carbon dioxide emissions more than any other country in the world in 2017. In fact, it was the ninth time in this century that the United States has had the largest reductions in carbon dioxide emissions in the world. U.S. carbon dioxide emissions declined by 0.5 percent or 42 million metric tons in 2017. It was the third consecutive year that carbon dioxide emissions declined in the United States.

Globally, carbon dioxide emissions increased 1.6 percent to 33.4 billion metric tons—an increase of 426 million metric tons. The rate of growth of global carbon dioxide emissions last year was faster than the 1.3 percent average growth rate of the previous 10-year period.

The world largest emitter of carbon dioxide emissions is China, whose emissions increased by 1.6 percent in 2017—by 118 million metric tons, or almost 3 times as much as U.S. emissions were reduced. According to the BP Statistical Review of World Energy, China produces 28 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. India is the world’s third largest emitter of carbon dioxide and had the second largest increment (93 million metric tons) of carbon dioxide emissions in 2017, more than twice as much an increase as the U.S. reduction. Together, China and India accounted for almost half (212 million metric tons) of the increase in total global carbon dioxide emissions (426 million metric tons) in 2017. The world’s increase in carbon dioxide was more than 10 times the reduction of the United States.

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Decarbonization of the Electricity Sector

One of the strategies for reducing carbon dioxide emissions was to decarbonize the generating sector—mainly by reducing coal and increasing renewable energy, particularly wind and solar power. This strategy has been part of the plan for the European Union and for the United States under former President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan.

An interesting result from the BP data is that the world has essentially made no progress towards decarbonizing its electricity sector over the last 32 years. In 1985, 36 percent of the world’s electricity was generated from low-carbon sources (hydro, nuclear, renewable energy). In 2017, 33 percent of the world’s electricity was generated from low-carbon sources. Increased generation from non-hydroelectric renewables (solar, wind, biomass) provided only about half of the increase in world electricity demand over the last ten years.

China and India remain large generators of coal-fired electricity, producing 67 percent and 76 percent of their electricity from coal respectively.

The United States made progress in moving toward decarbonization of its generation sector by generating 36 percent of its power in 2017 from non-carbon sources compared to 27 percent in 1985. Non-hydroelectric renewables produced 10 percent of U.S. generation in 2017.

The European Union has also moved toward decarbonization, generating 55 percent of its power from non-carbon sources compared to 40 percent in 1985. In 2017, the European Union generated 20 percent of its electricity from non-hydroelectric renewables. The European Union’s share of global carbon dioxide emissions, however, is only about 10 percent.

France is still generating over 70 percent of its power from nuclear energy. However, other countries, such has Germany and Japan, are moving away from nuclear power. Since 2001, when Germany’s nuclear plants were at their peak performance, Germany reduced its generation from nuclear power by 56 percent. The country has turned to wind and solar power, generating 22 percent of its electricity from those sources and backing them up primarily with coal-fired electricity. Germany produces a higher percentage of its electricity from coal (37 percent) than the United States (31 percent), the world’s largest holder of coal reserves.

Japan’s nuclear power generation was reduced to almost zero in the aftermath of the 2011 tsunami that hit several nuclear power plants. Japan’s nuclear generation is now at just 9 percent of its peak level reached in 1998. To replace the lost nuclear generation, Japan generates some electricity from wind and solar power (almost 7 percent), has increased its production of electricity from gas plants, and continues to use coal for electricity generation.

Conclusion

Global carbon dioxide emissions increased in 2017, despite the Paris Accord—a pact made by almost 200 countries to voluntarily reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. The United States was one of the few countries that decreased its carbon dioxide emissions in 2017. In fact, it had the largest reduction in carbon dioxide emissions. China and India both increased their carbon dioxide emissions, together contributing about half of the increase in the world’s carbon dioxide emissions.

Countries have targeted the generation sector as the most effective means to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, replacing coal-fired generation with renewable energy. However, globally, the generation sector has not made progress in moving toward decarbonization over the past 32 years.

 

The post U.S. Achieves Biggest CO2 Reduction by Any Nation in the World in 2017 appeared first on Natural Gas Now.

https://www.shaledirectories.com/blog/u-s-achieves-biggest-co2-reduction-by-any-nation-in-the-world-in-2017/

Saturday, August 4, 2018

Infographic: Thanks to New York’s Fracking Ban, “Twin Tiers” Now Look More Like Distant Cousins

https://www.shaledirectories.com/blog/infographic-thanks-to-new-yorks-fracking-ban-twin-tiers-now-look-more-like-distant-cousins/

The Delaware Riverkeeper’s Desperate Anti-Pipeline Campaign Derailed

Tom.jpg?resize=75%2C95Tom Shepstone
Shepstone Management Company, Inc.

Pennsylvania’s Commonwealth Court just smacked Delaware Povertykeeper again as the latter continues to pursue its desperate anti-pipeline campaign.

The Commonwealth Court issued an opinion Wednesday that dealt the Delaware Povertykeeper a/k/a Riverkeeper yet another blow to its desperate anti pipeline campaign; one intended to halt the shale revolution by preventing the transportation of the stuff to market. It’s a completely disingenuous campaign, of course, but Ms. Disingenuity knows exactly how to play to her funders and they want the revolution smashed. So, she’s using their money to finance one lawsuit after another to delay, frustrate and squelch every pipeline project that serve to move Marcellus Shale gas to New York and New Jersey where it’s needed.

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The court case is an arcane one, but then, many of them are. It’s about a very late filed Povertykeeper petition to the Pennsylvania Environmental Hearing Board to hear a challenge to Pennsylvania DEP’s granting of a water quality certification under Federal law to the PennEast Pipeline project (emphasis added):

Petitioners, The Delaware Riverkeeper Network and Maya van Rossum, The Delaware Riverkeeper (Riverkeeper, collectively), petition for review of the Pennsylvania Environmental Hearing Board’s (EHB) October 24, 2017 Orderdenying Riverkeeper’s Petition for Leave to File Appeal Nunc Pro Tunc (Nunc Pro Tunc Petition).1 Through this Nunc Pro Tunc Petition, Riverkeeper requested permission to file what otherwise would have been an untimely challenge to Respondent Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Department of EnvironmentalProtection’s (DEP) February 7, 2017 approval of Intervenor PennEast Pipeline Company, LLC’s (PPC) Water Quality Certification application… After careful review, we affirm the EHB.

The opinion conclusion provides further insights:

After careful review, we conclude that the EHB did not err or abuse its discretion in denying Riverkeeper’s Nunc Pro Tunc Petition. Riverkeeper were never enjoined, in this case or any other, from appealing DEP’s approval of a Water Quality Certification application to the EHB…

Moreover, as the EHB noted in its opinion, Riverkeeper possess considerable knowledge and experience regarding challenges to DEP approvals of such applications, by virtue of Riverkeeper’s conduct and involvement in other, similar matters, thereby diminishing the likelihood that Riverkeeper were actually misled by the allegedly incomplete information in the DEP’s February 25, 2017 notice

Therefore, we agree with the EHB that Riverkeeper had no legal justification for failing to file a timely appeal with the EHB. We conclude that the EHB did not abuse its discretion in finding that Riverkeeper had shown neither that they relied on the misleading February 25, 2017 DEP notice nor that they acted diligently to preserve their appellate rights. Consequently, because Riverkeeper failed to establish“good cause” to permit the filing of an appeal nunc pro tunc with the EHB, we affirmthe EHB’s October 24, 2017 Order.

What’s also interesting is how Ms. Disingenuity describes herself for purposes of this proceeding:

Maya van Rossum is the Delaware Riverkeeper, a full-time, privately funded ombudsman who is responsible for the protection of the waterways in the Delaware River Watershed.

If the Maya is a “privately funded ombudsman,” just who is that made her “responsible for the protection of the waterways.” The answer, of course, is that her responsibility is to her special interest funders who want to make a wilderness playground of areas that also happen to have shale gas. That shale gas is a potential foundation for economic development that would raise property values and make it more difficult for those funders and their allies to acquire land for the wilderness.

This is what is behind the legal challenge the Delaware Povertykeeper knew was going nowhere when it filed it. It was merely another delaying tactic and they’ll probably be van appeal to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and then further appeals to Federal Court as the legal harassment of PennEast on all possible fronts in a futile attempt to prevent Marcellus Shale gas from getting out of Northeastern Pennsylvania. The more it can be delayed, the less chance the shale revolution will ever reach the Delaware River basin. It’s an act of desperation, in other words.

The reasons for that desperation are readily apparent in EIA’s Today In Energy column yesterday. It’s because the  Povertykeeper organization and Ms. Disingenuity herself both know what new pipeline infrastructure is doing for the Pennsylvania shale revolution; it’s increasing prices for the natural gas and bringing them more in line with Henry Hub pricing. Here  are the important excerpts from the story:

Over the past decade, natural gas production in the Appalachian region has grown faster than capacity to move the gas into U.S. markets, pushing down local prices. More recently, pipeline infrastructure from Appalachia has increased capacity to deliver Appalachian natural gas to regional market, increasing relative spot prices at Appalachian hubs, and narrowing their price spreads relative to the U.S. natural gas price benchmark Henry Hub in Louisiana.

Natural gas production in the Appalachian region averaged 22 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) in 2017, an increase of 25% from 2015 average levels. EIA’s latest data indicate that production has continued to increase, and production in the Appalachian region reached 26 Bcf/d in April 2018. Based on 2017 estimates, production in the Appalachian region accounted for almost half of total U.S. dry natural gas production.

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…Generally, this price spread widens in the summer months (April through September) and narrows in the winter months (October through March), when demand in regions with more pipeline capacity increases in the winter months.

As infrastructure in the Appalachian region has increased, however, the summer price spread to Henry Hub has decreased. For example, in the summer of 2015, the Dominion South price was $1.48 per million British thermal units (MMBtu) lower than Henry Hub, but by summer 2017, the Dominion South Hub was $1.07/MMBtu lower than Henry Hub…

On June 1, 2018, Rover Pipeline’s interconnect to the Vector pipeline and Dawn Hub, near Detroit, Michigan, was completed, which increased takeaway capacity from southwest Pennsylvania and further narrowed the price spread between Dominion South and Henry Hub. In June, the Dominion South price was $0.71/MMBtu lower than Henry Hub; however, the Marcellus and Leidy hubs were $1.01/MMbtu and $1.04/MMbtu lower than Henry Hub, respectively.

The Transco Atlantic Sunrise project, which will connect natural gas production centers in northeastern Pennsylvania to demand centers in Mid-Atlantic and southern states, is expected to be completed by the end of 2018. As this project comes online, price spreads between the northern hubs and Henry Hub will likely narrow.

And, that’s the reason for all the challenges, lawsuits and petitions. Anything that slows down pipelines such as the PennEast delays the inevitable day when Pennsylvania producers get what they deserve for their shale gas and the revolution spreads. A spreading revolution threatens the gentry class plans for making a wilderness and that’s why they keep funneling the money to the Povertykeeper organization and Ms. Disingenuity to muck up the works.

 

The post The Delaware Riverkeeper’s Desperate Anti-Pipeline Campaign Derailed appeared first on Natural Gas Now.

https://www.shaledirectories.com/blog/the-delaware-riverkeepers-desperate-anti-pipeline-campaign-derailed/

Friday, August 3, 2018

Pennsylvania’s Shale Gas Impact Fees Are Up; Don’t Mess with Them!

ConnieMellin.jpgConnie Mellin
Natural Gas NOW
“PAShaleAdvocate”

 

The impact fees Pennsylvania receives from shale drilling have jumped up a whopping 21% and will be distributed to all counties across the Commonwealth.

We hear Governor Tom Wolf talk about Pennsylvania adopting a severance tax to ensure natural gas producers are paying their fair share. What he fails to say is, natural gas drillers are already paying their fair share through the existing Act 13 impact fee.  Since 2012, when the impact fee was enacted, nearly $1.5 billion has been generated from natural gas development and been distributed to every county in the Commonwealth.

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Disbursements and Impact Fees

The Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission (PUC) published a press release in June to announcing the impact fees on natural gas producers collected for 2017 totaled $209,557,300. This is a whopping 21% higher than what was collected in 2016.  It also reverses a three year decline in impact fee revenues.

The Allegheny Institute for Public Policy published an excellent article yesterday about the 2017 impact fees collected and how they will be used and distributed. Here are a few excerpts (emphasis added):

For those counties hosting an unconventional well, their allocation is determined by the number of wells they host.  For example, the county with the most unconventional wells in 2017 was Washington County (1,528) and as a result collected the largest amount of money ($7.09 million) from this section of Act 13.  The runner-up is Susquehanna County (1,274 wells), earning $5.91 million.  As two of the top counties with wells, Washington has collected more than $38.85 million over the years while Susquehanna has collected more than $35.53 million.  Allegheny County, with only 125 eligible wells, a fraction of the total, has received $2.15 million over time.  As largely rural counties, Washington’s population is 207,981 and Susquehanna’s is just 40,862.  These totals are quite significant and most likely larger than if the state would switch to a severance tax instead and the money was allocated from Harrisburg at the whim of those viewing the shale industry as a cash cow for their own pet projects.

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And of course that was the intent of Act 13—to place a fee (tax) on those drilling in the Marcellus and Utica shale formations using the technique of hydraulic fracturing (unconventional wells).  The money would then bypass the political machinations of Harrisburg and send the money directly to those counties and communities most impacted by the activity surrounding the drilling and to those state agencies that would also be impacted from the activity.  The money distributed even has strings attached as to how it can be spent such as on public infrastructure construction, storm water/sewer systems, emergency preparedness/public safety and environmental programs, among others.

Yet the clamoring for a severance tax continues.  But what those favoring a severance tax fail to consider is that not only do drillers pay the impact fee, they also pay the assorted business taxes levied by the commonwealth and pay royalties to leaseholders.  According to the Marcellus Shale Coalition president in a recent op-ed, that has amounted to $4.5 billion to date on top of the impact fees total of $1.43 billion.  The latest proposal from Harrisburg will leave in place the impact fee and couple it with a severance tax amounting to double taxation on the industry.

A severance tax has the potential to curtail production causing a reduction in these payments as drilling will likely be reduced or shifted to neighboring states that are also above the Marcellus and Utica shale formations.  The impact fee has struck a balance between holding drillers accountable for their activities and generating much needed revenues to those counties and municipalities most affected.

The impact fee has been working for Pennsylvania’s communities. Adding a severance tax on top of it would certainly have a negative impact on Pennsylvania’s natural gas industry.

The post Pennsylvania’s Shale Gas Impact Fees Are Up; Don’t Mess with Them! appeared first on Natural Gas Now.

https://www.shaledirectories.com/blog/pennsylvanias-shale-gas-impact-fees-are-up-dont-mess-with-them/

Thursday, August 2, 2018

Holtec to purchase, decommission Oyster Creek NPP

Exelon Generation and Holtec International have an agreement under which Holtec will purchase Oyster Creek Generating Station, a nuclear power plant (NPP) located in New Jersey.

Under the terms of the agreement, subject to regulatory approvals, Holtec will assume ownership of the site, real property and used nuclear fuel. As the site’s owner, Holtec will manage all site decommissioning and restoration activities.

The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of 2019, pending the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s and other regulatory approval, and will not impact the scheduled shutdown of Oyster Creek, as previously announced.

Holtec will accelerate Oyster Creek’s decommissioning timeline.

“This landmark agreement is good news for Oyster Creek employees, the Lacey community and the state of New Jersey,” said Bryan Hanson, Exelon Generation’s chief nuclear officer. “Holtec’s commitment to the nuclear industry and its presence in New Jersey will allow many of our employees previously facing relocation to continue living and working in the Garden State … .”

As the new owner of the plant, Holtec will contract with Comprehensive Decommissioning International (CDI) to perform the decontamination and decommissioning of the plant. CDI is a joint venture company of Holtec and France’s SNC-Lavalin.

CDI expects to decommission Oyster Creek within eight years, more than 50 years ahead of the industry-allowed 60-year timeline.

The funds from the site’s decommissioning trust will be transferred to Holtec upon closing and will be used by Holtec to cover the cost of the decommissioning. The trust fund was established decades ago to pay for decommissioning, and no additional funds from utility customers will be required.

In February 2018, Exelon Generation announced Oyster Creek will permanently shut down this fall, at the end of its current operating cycle. Exelon Generation is required to close Oyster Creek no later than December 2019 as part of an agreement with the State of New Jersey.

Oyster Creek is located roughly 60 miles east of Philadelphia in Ocean County, New Jersey. The plant produces 636 net megawatts of electricity.


https://www.shaledirectories.com/blog/holtec-to-purchase-decommission-oyster-creek-npp/

Wednesday, August 1, 2018

Ercot surpasses all-time peak hourly load in July

On July 18, electricity demand in the area served by the Electricity Reliability Council of Texas (Ercot) reached a new all-time hourly peak load of 72,192 megawatts during the hour starting at 4 p.m., the Energy Information Administration reported Tuesday.

That record was broken one day later, during the hour starting at 5 p.m., with load reaching 73,259 MW. The previous record of 71,110 MW occurred on Aug. 11, 2016.

Despite some sporadic power outages, Ercot managed this new record demand without any widespread loss of load to the system, EIA said.

In its seasonal assessment earlier this year, Ercot had expected it would break the its all-time daily peak load this summer, Kallanish Energy reports. While the assessment projected a new peak 1,600 MW higher than the previous record set in 2016, the actual load record set on July 19 was roughly 2,100 MW higher than the 2016 peak.

Recent coal power plant retirements and increased summer electricity demand have reduced the current reserve margins in Ercot, EIA found. This summer, Ercot estimated a reserve margin of 10.9% of peak demand, which is lower than the planned reserve margin for Ercot of 13.8%, and lower than the 15% reserve margin recommended by the North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC) for systems that predominately use thermal generation, such as Ercot.

Reserve margins reflect the amount of excess available generating capacity as a percentage of total capacity at projected peak system demand.


https://www.shaledirectories.com/blog/ercot-surpasses-all-time-peak-hourly-load-in-july/

Depletionism: Religion of Fractivists and Other Environmental Extremists

IER-light-noletters-75x38.pngInstitute for
Energy Research

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The religion of fractivists and other environmental extremists may be described as depletionism, a new Malthusian creed based on fear and selfishness.

Last week, a group of sustainable population organizations issued a global statement and call to action for World Population Day. According to the statement,

“World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice warned that runaway consumption of limited resources by a rapidly growing population is crippling the Earth’s life-support systems, jeopardizing our future. Identifying population as a “main driver” of the crisis, its recommended actions include reducing fertility rates through education, family planning and rallying leaders behind the goal of establishing a sustainable human population.”

Modern concerns about overpopulation can be traced back to Thomas Robert Malthus’ Essay on the Principle of Overpopulation (1798) where he theorized that humanity would not be able to produce enough food to keep up with the exponentially expanding population. Malthus’ view was the result of mistakenly believing that the supply of resources is finite and, therefore, would be depleted as population grew over time. William Stanley Jevons transferred this view to the study of mineral resources in The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal Mines (1865).

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Thomas Robert Malthus

It’s clear that both Malthus and Jevons have influenced groups warning about overpopulation, leading them to believe that economic growth is bad in a world they perceive to be made up of finite resources. In 2016, Pierre Desrochers and Vincent Geloso published an article in New Perspectives on Political Economy in which they contrast this depletionist view with the modern view of resourceship.

Depletionism

Desrochers and Geloso identify three recurring themes in the depletionist worldview.

  1. Depletionists believe that, everything else being equal, a reduced population will enjoy a higher standard of living. Their finite view of resources leads them to believe that a lower population would make more resources available for each person, creating a higher standard of living.
  2. They tend to assume that humans experience decreasing returns on investment. The argument here is that it is increasingly difficult and expensive to extract the same value out of less concentrated resources as the fixed stock of resources is depleted over time.
  3.  Depletionists also argue that past successes in overcoming our natural limitations are irrelevant to present and future circumstances. Depletionists often rely on newly discovered information or recently changed circumstances to argue that we lack the ability to overcome similar problems in the future.

Resourceship

Desrochers and Geloso contrast the depletionist worldview with the resourceship view, which they define by the following themes:

  1. The resourceship view understands that a larger population that engages in trade and the division of labor will deliver more material abundance per person than a smaller population.
  2. Human creativity can deliver increasing returns. As Desrochers and Geloso explain, “a long-standing tenet of resourceship is that the more human brains, the greater the likelihood of new beneficial innovations.”
  3. Human beings are different from other animals because of our ability to trade and innovate. Desrochers and Geloso draw upon economist Henry George’s observation in his book Progress and Poverty to make this point. George writes, of “all living things, man is the only one who can give play to the reproductive forces more powerful than his own, which supply him with food.” In other words, our ability to trade and innovate means that we should not compare humans to other species, and we shouldn’t apply ecological constraints such as carrying capacity to the human condition.
  4. Past success should be grounds for optimism. Over a long-term perspective, when people are engaged in specialization and trade, resources tend to become less scarce and less expensive. Because of this, Desrochers and Geloso explain, “as such, future projections based on very recent trends should not be taken seriously.”
  5. People who hold resourceship views tend to oppose coercive measures to curtail population or resource use out of fear that the depletionists’ doomsday outlook will prevent their remedies from being limited to incentive-based measures. Desrochers and Geloso quote the French mutualist theorist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon who explained that Malthusianism was, “the theory of political murder; of murder from motives of philanthropy and for love of God.”

Overpopulation Is Not a Problem

Between 1960 and 2016 the world’s population increased by 145 percent. During that same time, the real average per capita income in the world rose by 183 percent. This massive growth in population led to the largest reduction in poverty in human history. As Marian L. Tupy of the Cato Institute explains,

Rising incomes helped lower the infant mortality rate from 64.8 per 1,000 live births in 1990 to 30.5 in 2016. That’s a 53 percent reduction. Over the same time period, the mortality rate for children under five years of age declined from 93.4 per 1,000 to 40.8. That’s a reduction of 56 percent. The number of maternal deaths declined from 532,000 in 1990 to 303,000 in 2015 — a 43 percent decrease. Famine has all but disappeared outside of war zones. In 1961, food supply in 54 out of 183 countries was less than 2,000 calories per person per day. That was true of only two countries in 2013. In 1960, average life expectancy in the world was 52.6 years. In 2015, it was 71.9 years — a 37 percent increase.

It’s clear that the data lend credence to the resourceship view of population. A higher population does not lead to more problems; it simply means that there are more minds working to improve the human condition.  When you combine more people with institutions that support human progress (property rights, markets, and the rule of law), humans are able to overcome the natural limitations that other species face. There are no limits to human ingenuity and economic growth.

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Doomsday scenarios about population can make for a compelling narrative—which might be the reason why they are often championed in popular media and the press—but they are not based on a realistic understanding of the human condition. When you overlook the acting nature of humans and the institutions that make up a free society, it’s easy to believe that resources are finite and that the current path of humanity is inevitably doomed. But the reality is that the human condition is defined by our ability to act, and the trajectory of human progress is dependent upon the institutional framework within which that action takes place.

The author of this post is Alex Stevens, a Policy Associate at the Institute for Energy Research.

Cover_first_edition_Limits_to_growth.jpgEditor’s Note: This philosophical guest post got my attention because it brought back memories of when the book “Limits to Growth” was a popular screed and Malthusian outlooks prevailed. The book was produced by the Club of Rome, a group of wealthy trust-funder types who worried the masses would crowd them out. It used computer models to claim we would run out of everything if we didn’t stop producing children. They were utterly and completely wrong about everything, just as Thomas Malthus was. He later rejected his own theory, in fact. Nonetheless, there are always people who are attracted to this nonsense because they, too, feel threatened by the prosperity of the common man, fearful their own playgrounds will be overrun by the lower classes.

This philosophy of depletionism is the foundation of fractivism and other forms of environmentalism extremism. It, too, is funded and promoted by modern Club of Rome types such as the Rockefeller foundations, the Heinz Endowments, et al. They want their wildernesses and the common man as far way from them as possible while they pursue their other special interests such as overseas oil and gas investments. They are de-growthers as far as the the U.S. is concerned; “haves” determined to eliminate any threats from “have nots” who might want a piece of the pie. 

The fallacy of their position, of course, is that the pie is always growing as well as long as there are more people. This is because there is, then, greater division of labor. This alone is what creates higher productivity and new wealth. More hands to do the work means more specialization and with it the growth of productivity. Technological advancements come about because we are able to specialize and the competition of capitalism ensures their is a race to get there, which ultimately delivers more for everyone. This is why commodity prices over the long-term tend to decrease, not increase. The real resource is our own labor and nothing else.

This is also why we’ll never run out of any resource. Our ability to utilize resources more efficiently grows with population, the increased division of labor, technological gains and competition. And, if one resource needed to produce a product becomes more scarce, then the price will go up. This incentivizes finding more of it, using less of it and/or switching to another, which is why we’ll never run out of any particular resource. It will simply cost too much at some point and technology will assist our shift to a new resource or a new technology.

Fractivists and environmental extremists understand none of this, of course, and probably never will. That’s why our battle for common sense and economic understanding must go on.

 

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https://www.shaledirectories.com/blog/depletionism-religion-of-fractivists-and-other-environmental-extremists/