Winter 2015—The American Conservation Ethic: Protecting Liberty And Fostering Freedom And Prosperity

We live in a challenging time. We human beings live in an increasingly interconnected world where people are more crowded and more competitive over Earth’s natural resources. We live on a planet where many of us are keenly aware of the pressures of modern living and the demands of complex societies that seem to close in around us. Many of the challenges we face involve our natural environment and humanity’s ability to manage natural resources in a way that favors societal growth and prosperity. As a college student at BYU who ultimately decided to get his undergraduate degree in the social sciences, I have spent a great deal of time over the past three and a half years taking classes that focus on the daunting challenges characteristic of mankind’s experience with this imperfect world of ours.

It’s important for people to understand that these problems are not merely theoretical in nature; these problems are not just obscure topics of the college classroom or the think tank lunch lounge. I know from firsthand experience in my own community of California’s Central Valley that environmental challenges often hit very close to home. Last August, the National Geographic magazine published an online article written by Dennis Dimick in which the author warned readers of California’s ongoing water crisis, which has been exacerbated by my home state’s shrinking supply of groundwater. Because of recurring drought conditions, California’s farmers have been forced in recent years to pump more and more water from underground aquifers. These aquifers are fast becoming depleted and cannot sustain California’s water needs indefinitely. In years free of drought, California—and the whole of the United States—generally gets more water use out of traditional surface sources like reservoirs, lakes, rivers, and snowpacks. However, a recent report from Stanford University claims that nearly 60 percent of California’s water needs are now met by groundwater, up from 40 percent in years when normal amounts of rain and snow fall. Californian well-diggers have had to dig far deeper than normal to access these underground aquifers, raising concerned cries from many quarters that federal government agencies need to step in and strictly regulate my state’s water use habits.

Anyone following my past blog posts will know that I take a dim view of anyone calling for more government regulation of the private sector’s use of the environment. Now before the inevitable cries of protest arise, let me assure the reader that I do not believe there should be NO governmental regulation of the environment! I am simply saying that in our day and age, when humanity has made such remarkable progress and acquired so much wisdom with regards to responsible stewardship of Planet Earth, increased regulation seems to me to be a less-than-desirable choice. History teaches us that when people are set free to discover and experiment and innovate and solve problems in the best ways they know how, humankind usually surmounts the challenges presented by the natural environment.

A case in point concerns a problem that I have been hearing about all my life: gas prices. Throughout my entire life, I’ve lived in a society where “common knowledge” has informed us that the ridiculously high prices we pay at the pump are solely reliant upon Middle Eastern supplies of oil, that we Americans have been held hostage by greedy Big Oil executives and anti-American Saudi petroleum tycoons undeserving of our business in the first place. And besides, this “common knowledge” would say, oil itself is a dirty commodity that only ruins our planet and pollutes nature. In short, oil has been associated with evil and a path of self-destruction for the human race.

Let’s just take a moment and set the theatrics aside. In the past month or so, Americans have watched in fascination as gas prices have fallen to unprecedented low levels. As if by magic, the pain at the pump has been replaced by pleasure at the pump (I’m not kidding about the pleasure part, based upon many of my Facebook friends’ recent posts).

Why have gasoline prices come down as if by magic? What can we do to ensure that low prices continue in the future? Ed Feulner, a founding member of the Heritage Foundation, recently attempted to answer these questions:

“Some of it, unfortunately, is beyond our control. Worldwide demand for oil is down now. That always causes the cost of gasoline to drop. But the other side of the equation — the part that is under our control — has gone largely unheralded in many media accounts: the boom in U.S. energy production. Simply put, we’re producing much more energy domestically these days, and that is, predictably enough, pushing prices downward. Since 2008, we’ve increased our domestic supply of oil by 50 percent. Thanks to technological breakthroughs such as hydraulic fracturing (‘fracking’) and horizontal drilling, we’re able to find and extract far more oil than we possibly could have years ago. Oil production in states such as North Dakota, Texas and Oklahoma has doubled in the last six years. The United States is now the world’s No. 1 producer of oil and natural gas. Signs that read ‘No to fracking’ might as well read, ‘Yes to higher prices,’ and ‘no’ to the more than 100,000 jobs created in the oil and gas extraction industry over the last few years. It all comes down to supply and demand. It’s pretty simple. We can’t do much about worldwide demand, but we can do a lot about supply.

“What should we do? Stop impeding markets.

“First, lift the ban on crude oil exports. A recent IHS study found that removing the ban would lower gasoline prices by 8 cents per gallon, saving drivers $265 billion over 15 years and adding nearly 1 million jobs by 2018. Second, lift the drilling bans and approve the Keystone XL oil pipeline. We need more exploration in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, and along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. We should also be conducting more lease sales off Alaska’s coasts. Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is another abundant source of oil, with an estimated 10.4 billion barrels of oil resting beneath a few thousand acres. Third, repeal the ethanol mandate. This rule forces refineries to blend increasing amounts of ethanol into gasoline each year, reaching 36 billion gallons in 2022. It’s already driven up fuel and food prices, according to multiple federal-agency and government-backed studies. Fourth, prohibit greenhouse gas regulations. The Department of the Interior has already suspended oil and gas leases because of their alleged impact on climate change. Coming greenhouse gas regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency will increase the cost of energy production — and producers will pass those costs on to consumers. Yet the regulations will have no meaningful impact on the climate, the EPA has acknowledged.

“Notice the one thing these steps have in common? It’s government getting out of the way. The secret to extending the streak of lower energy prices, it turns out, is no secret at all: Let markets work.”

It’s unfortunate that so many people in positions of power seem to disagree with Ed Feulner’s recommendations. These people claim that the answer to environmental challenges involves more government control, but that simply is not the case. In the age of Obama, government seems to actually be an opponent of growth and prosperity.

Take the controversy over the Keystone Pipeline as an example of the Obama administration’s antipathy towards America’s self-reliance in matters of oil energy. The Obama administration has cited various environmental and economic objections to the construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline, a $5.2 billion project that would carry 830,000 barrels of oil per day from Alberta, Canada, through the U.S. down to the Gulf of Mexico. The 1,179-mile project is supposed to create jobs and reduce U.S. reliance on oil from the Middle East. Shawn Howard, one of the spokesmen for the project, has said that the “Keystone system is about helping our Canadian and American customers—which includes leading U.S. oil producers and refiners—get a safe, secure and reliable supply of crude oils they need to create products we all need—gasoline, diesel, aviation fuels and many other products we use and consume here in North America. After being approved, Keystone XL will employ thousands of skilled American pipeline industry workers in the United States.” And just in case you were thinking that the only people who support the Keystone project are people who actually work for big oil companies, polls have actually shown that the American public supports further construction on the pipeline in very high proportions, sometimes as high as 70 percent.

Nevertheless, President Obama and his team of federal bureaucrats and congressional yes-men have prevaricated, stalled, and delayed the pipeline’s construction for six long years. The reason? Well, in the president’s own words, because the pipeline has “impacted greenhouse gas emissions” in a way that has led to “severe weather patterns.”

Yeah. I’m not sure what that means either. Somehow, I think President Obama wants us to believe that he worries about the pipeline’s supposed threat to our planet’s health.

I have another theory about Obama’s opposition, but I’ll get into that later. The point that I am trying to make right now is this: even though the Keystone pipeline is expected to support more than 42,000 direct and indirect jobs nationwide, opposition groups continue to use arguably discreditable justifications for preventing the pipeline’s completion. Some scholars have analyzed these discreditable justifications and have discovered that they are the same outdated arguments that wacky environmentalists have been using since the 1970s when they tried to halt the completion of the Trans-Alaska pipeline. One article that I used for research for today’s blog post evaluated the Alaska project with this straightforward sentence: “Today, the Alaska Pipeline is recognized almost universally as a technological marvel, an energy policy success story that reduced American reliance on Middle Eastern oil, and one of the most economically successful infrastructure projects in American history.”

If human ingenuity could accomplish that in the 1970s with very little negative environmental impact, why should we think the American free market would accomplish less in the year 2015? Sadly, I expect opposition from both the Obama administration and environmental groups will continue into the foreseeable future.

I mentioned earlier that President Obama seems to want all of us little people to believe that he actually cares about the environmental health of the planet. And yet, a careful look at his environmental policies reveals that a lot of his actions do not match the beliefs of someone who fervently cares about Mother Earth.

Last November, President Obama made a surprise announcement with President Xi Jinping of China, the world’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide. In this announcement, the two leaders released their respective countries’ targets for cutting greenhouse-gas emissions. As part of the agreement, Obama pledged to cut U.S. emissions by more than a quarter before 2025. Amazingly, the agreement also allowed the Chinese to plan for peaking their emissions in the year 2030! In other words, while Obama promised to cut American emissions, he also gave tacit permission for the Chinese to expand emissions in the near future!

Want proof that Obama isn’t totally in-step with wacky environmentalist doctrine? Kyle Ash, the senior legislative director at Greenpeace in Washington, D.C., actually criticized Obama’s announcement, saying that “we need a peak emissions goal from China that’s five or 10 years sooner than what they proposed.” From other quarters, people have criticized Obama’s idiotic trust in the Chinese government. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky “was particularly distressed by the deal apparently [Obama’s] reached with the Chinese on his current trip, which as I read the agreement, requires the Chinese to do nothing at all for 16 years while these carbon regulations are creating havoc in my state and other states around the country.”

Clearly, there is plenty of evidence that Obama is not cutting back on America’s productivity because he’s in any hurry to save the planet. So why would the president wish to limit American growth?

For a full and complete answer to this question, I wish to point readers to an excellent outside source. The best argument I’ve ever read on the subject of Barack Obama’s motivations in pursuing governmental policy is contained in Dinesh D’Souza’s incredible book, The Roots Of Obama’s Rage. In this book, D’Souza gives what I think is the best appraisal of Barack Obama’s personal ideology and how it fits in with all of the president’s policies. For the purposes of this blog post, it is crucial for the reader to understand that Obama’s environmental ideology is largely determined by his warped sense of economic justice—a justice he apparently feels is his duty to personally enforce with the power invested in the high office he now holds.

Here’s the short version of D’Souza’s story—at least the part that is relevant to this blog post: President Obama’s economic policies have clearly been influenced by his anti-colonial upbringing. He has followed the policy papers written by his father in the 1960s by attempting at every turn to overthrow and punish the “overclass” of corporate America both at home and abroad. Obama has given money to Brazilian oil drilling while placing a moratorium on all American offshore drilling. He has supported meddlesome environmental policies like cap and trade, irresponsible solar and wind investments, and carbon taxation. He has used bailout funds to nudge car companies to produce “green” cars that cannot hold up in the private marketplace. He tries to force carbon emission limitations on American companies while going easy on corresponding offenders in places like China and India. It’s as if Obama believes America and the West exploit more than their fair share of the world’s resources and all at the expense of the poorer nations. And it’s as if Obama considers it his personal responsibility to bring “big bad America” back into line by having the U.S. pay off it’s supposed “climate debt” through donations to international anti-poverty programs.

Naturally, I cannot prove without a shadow of doubt that Dinesh D’Souza’s analysis of our president is true, but it is the theory that I believe holds the most water. If you don’t believe me, well, as they say, read the book.

But if it is true, having a president who thinks in such redistributionist terms is scary enough. But let us not forget that even though Barack Obama may not be a radical environmentalist at heart, he still can rely upon the general support of a radical movement with long experience in opposing free market progress. I have just explained why I think Obama has his own unique reasons for cutting back American productivity, but it is important to remember that there are plenty of radical environmentalists out there who hold a distorted view of mankind’s place in the world. Remember the 1960s? Remember when leftist radicals were screaming from college campuses across the nation that the 1970s would be a decade that saw the death of reason and the rise of the hippie golden age, a time when technological progress and materialism would be replaced by a supposed “age of Aquarius?” What these anti-technological and firmly communistic radicals failed to understand in their quest to destroy technology, progress, and the very foundations of capitalistic society in the name of the somewhat nebulous cause of “saving the planet” was this: the triumph of Western civilization is directly related to the rebirth of reason in the Renaissance and the triumph of rationality that led to advances in science, individualism, freedom, and ultimately, free markets. Because of this triumph of Western civilization, we in the 21^st century can look back at modern history and attribute mankind’s recent material abundance to a force that contemporary liberals have labeled as a dirty word: capitalism.

And now, this blog post has come full circle. Western civilization’s best answer to environmental challenges, limitations in natural resources, and complications arising from the fact that we live in an imperfect world? Capitalism. Free markets. Free people working to solve problems in unique, creative, and competitive ways.

Keeping Americans free to pursue their own economic destinies is the answer to the environmental challenges of the modern world. And despite liberal fears that selfish individuals will sacrifice the good of Mother Nature for the good of their pocketbooks, I remain convinced that humans have become more responsible—not less—through the years in their roles as Planet Earth’s stewards. We have become smarter, more adaptive, more creative, and more inventive. We have become more environmentally aware, not less so. We have developed ways of exploiting the Earth’s natural resources in cleaner ways. We have lessened our negative impacts on the natural environment around us. But even with all these advancements and positive developments, I am not suggesting that we get rid of governmental regulations entirely. I am simply saying that regulations should not prevent Americans from being competitive, successful, and growth-oriented. Even if it means overcoming Obama’s anti-colonialism or radical environmentalism, it is crucial for the United States to stay productive and growing and thriving. It’s not only good for our own prosperity, but it’s also good for our country’s ability to compete with rising geopolitical threats like Russia and China. Indeed, some economic experts, like Brett Arends, have said as recently as this last December that America has already been surpassed by super-charged economies in countries like China. These experts claim that for the first time since Ulysses S. Grant was president, America is not the leading economic power on the planet.

I hope these claims are not true. But if they are, I hope they will not stay true for long. Americans have the ability to remain the world’s most economically competitive and influential people. I can guarantee that the pathway to success in the future will be the same as the pathway to success in the past, which was centered on capitalism and free markets.

I am happy to hear of some Americans who are bravely standing up and expressing their frustration over the decisions made by our current crop of political leaders. These brave Americans openly admit that things are getting worse, that government increasingly seems to not work for the interests of the common people, that nobody seems to be fighting Obama’s agenda to change America, and that people are rolling over and accepting that more government is the answer to all our problems. I applaud these Americans and I agree with them.

When it comes to environmental policy, there’s a lot that we Americans need to fix. I now share with you some recommendations made last year by the Heritage Foundation:

Most environmental policy-making today is being done by executive agency actions, including regulation. Congress has delegated too much power to executive agencies to manage the environment and human health. As a result, costly regulations are developed by unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats instead of by the American people’s representatives in Congress. Congress should protect its role in policy-making in areas where federal attention is needed. Free markets and free people are the engines of superior environmental policy. Reforms should entrust more environmental improvement and resource management to states. Private property rights should be respected and recognized as a key element in protecting the environment. The Heritage Foundation’s American Conservation Ethic—which I wholeheartedly endorse and recommend—articulates eight principles as the underpinning for successful environmental policy that protects American freedoms and the environment:

1.      People are the most important, unique, and precious resource.

2.      Renewable natural resources are resilient and dynamic, responding positively to wise management.

3.      Private property protections and free markets provide the most promising new opportunities for environmental improvements.

4.      Efforts to reduce, control, and remediate pollution should achieve real environmental benefits.

5.      As we accumulate scientific, technological, and artistic knowledge, we learn how to get more from less.

6.      Management of natural resources should be conducted on a site- and situation-specific basis.

7.      Science should be employed as one tool to guide public policy.

8.      The most successful environmental policies emanate from liberty.

Finally, and most importantly, we need leaders willing to step up to the plate on these important policy issues. We need leaders who are willing to sacrifice a little personal popularity in favor of doing what’s right and calling for the right kinds of actions. That’s what real leadership is all about. Without leadership, this blog post’s call to action won’t ever leave the confines of this webpage.

--Christopher Peterson, January 31^st, 2015