The first of the popular idealistic movements to be taken over by professionals was ecology. The movement transformed the world, but not the way the eco-activists of the 1970's hoped it would. Even now, most of the people involved don't want to either recognize or claim most of the results of their work.
The ecology movement got it's start with biologist Rachel Carson's book {Silent Spring}, published in 1962. The book reached relatively few people but it caught their interest and, slowly, they spread the word in face-to-face contact with others.
Carson's main worry when she wrote the book was insecticides, which were killing birds, but smog in Los Angeles focussed attention on automobiles and their emissions.
The problem was that cars were burning too much gasoline and spewing out too much exhaust. The obvious solution was to use smaller engines, which would burn less fuel and produce less exhaust.
But that didn't work for the oil companies, because it would reduce consumption of oil, or for the automobile industry because car companies make more profit from selling image than from selling transportation.
Automakers in other countries had proved that modern engines need only three or four cylinders with a total of about 100 cubic inches displacement to keep up with modern traffic, but in the 1970's North American automakers made monster V8's with displacements up to 425 cubic inches. They thought their profits depended on big engines, and they did not want to make small ones.
So they co-opted the ecology movement. They argued that the problem was the quality of automotive emissions, not the quantity, and because they controlled the press they were able to make their argument stick. Under their guidance the US government approved a package of "emissions controls" that made cars much more expensive, and therefore more profitable.
The most important effect of the first generation of emissions controls was that the average fuel consumption of North American cars nearly doubled in a couple of years around 1973. That also doubled emissions, of course, but it was good for the oil industry because people bought and burned more gas, and good for the automakers because people bought even bigger engines -- up to 500 cubic inches -- to make up for the reduced efficiency.
One secondary effect of the increased fuel consumption was that the United States literally ran out of gasoline.
By the late 1960's and early 1970's US automakers were selling close to eight million new cars a year but about seven million old cars were scrapped every year, for a net gain of about one million cars a year. The oil companies planned refinery capacity and production to keep up with the demand, but they had to plan ahead because it takes several years to build or enlarge a refinery.
Because of emissions controls the new cars of the early 1970's burned about twice as much fuel as the new cars of the late 1960's. The usual numbers of eight million new cars sold and seven million old scars scrapped still added up to about one million more cars on the road, but now the eight million new cars burned nearly as much gasoline as 16 million of the old cars.
That meant the oil industry had to provide fuel for the equivalent of about nine million new cars a year, and they just couldn't do it. In the early 1970's Americans had to line up to buy gasoline from stations that sometimes ran out, and some people were shot and killed over a few gallons of gas.
The initial shortage blew over in a couple of years but by then the oil producing nations had seen the United States brought to its knees by a fuel shortage. They realized how much power they had and they formed OPEC to take advantage of it.
OPEC raised fuel prices so much that even Americans saw the need for more efficient cars and they began to buy the Japanese cars that had been coming into North America for nearly ten years, but which had not made much impact until then. Unfortunately for the American auto companies Japanese cars were among the best in the world, and the better quality and design opened the eyes of the American public.
In the years that followed Americans bought so many Japanese cars -- and so few American cars -- that the American auto industry was in serious danger of collapse. Chrysler Corporation survived only because the US government guaranteed the loans that saved it.
When the US auto industry stumbled the rest of the economy stumbled along with it and when the Japanese auto industry picked up the rest of Japanese industry picked up with it. By the late 1980's, the US had lost the industrial leadership of the world.
And we can speculate on other events that may have been caused by automotive emissions controls. The fuel crisis was a major embarrassment for the US government, and historically governments have often created foreign wars to distract attention from problems on the home front.
Until the early 1970's the US fought the Vietnam war as a defensive action within South Vietnam. President Nixon may have been looking for something to divert attention from the fuel crisis at home when he decided that American aircraft should bomb North Vietnam.
Meanwhile, other professional do-gooders zeroed in on the ecology business. The insecticide DDT had been a definite problem to the world and it was quickly banned but professional ecologists found a new substance that was even better for their purpose.
PolyChlorinated Biphenol, commonly called "PCB", is a synthetic oil that has one dominant characteristic. It is stable, and will not react with anything at normal temperatures. It will burn, but not easily.
It's a good coolant for big transformers and other electrical equipment because it does not break down under electrical sparks. Because PCB was cheap it was also used for other purposes, including road oil to control dust on dirt roads.
But because PCB is very stable animals that eat it can't break it down. That's not a serious problem for animals that eat a little bit of PCB themselves because it just goes into their fat, where it does no harm.
But as one animal eats another the PCB is concentrated. An amoeba that eats PCB gets very little of it but the insect that eats amoebas that eat PCB gets all the PCB that millions of amoeba have eaten. The fish that eats insects gets all the PCB that thousands of insects have eaten and a bird that eats fish gets all the PCB that hundreds of fish have eaten. Because the PCB is never broken down, it keeps moving up the food chain.
At the top of the chain some birds get very high concentrations of PCB which interfere with the formation of egg shells. This reduces their breeding success.
There is also a secondary problem that when PCB is burned at low temperatures it produces chemicals called dioxins, which are believed to be potential causes of cancer.
But PCB itself is not particularly dangerous. Men who made electrical transformers that used PCB as a coolant often worked with their hands and arms up to the elbows in the stuff, and they had less skin cancer than the average of the population.
After a case in Japan in which PCB was accidentally used as cooking oil by thousands of people for several months, doctors discovered that people who eat a lot of PCB develop thicker eyelids and a slight yellowing of the skin.
Given the facts the course of action was obvious. For a start, don't eat much PCB.
On a more serious level it made sense to stop production of PCB and especially to stop using it for road oil and other uses that distributed it directly into the environment. PCB used in transformers and other electrical equipment did no immediate harm but, because transformers can leak, it made sense to find some other fluid to cool them.
And because PCB will last forever it had to be destroyed, because otherwise it would eventually be released into the environment. Mixed with regular fuel it will burn in a diesel engine and provide about as much power as diesel fuel. Because the PCB will burn completely only when the engine is working hard it should be used only in an engine that works against a constant load -- such as an electrical generator or a pump. Fortunately there are thousands of diesel powered generators and pumps across Canada.
But there is still a better way to get rid of PCB. Cement plants all over the world burn limestone in giant torches which are fueled by powdered coal or oil. Tests at a cement plant in Mississauga proved that if PCB is mixed in with the fuel oil burned in a torch it is destroyed completely. Even the chlorine, which is released in any other form of disposal, is bound into the cement and it reduces the need to add chlorine from other sources.
It appears that the ideal way to dispose of PCB is to burn it in cement plants, but that would not produce any profits for the eco-vultures. Using Hitler's technique of the big lie hammered home through tame media they created the myth that PCB is dangerous, toxic and liable to cause cancer. It was too dangerous to use as fuel, so it should be stored until they could find a more expensive way to dispose of it.
Government officials approved but attitudes changed when a semi-legal PCB storage building at St. basile-le-grande Quebec burned in 1988. It turned out that the building was built to store 4,500 liters of PCB, was licensed to store 90,000 liters and actually contained 160,000 liters. Even at the 4,500 liter level it would not have been legal because the building was not surrounded by a fence and had no sprinkler system -- both of which are required by law.
The fire began a circus of protests and mock concern that eventually forced governments to agree on a solution. Rather than burn PCB as fuel in any of the dozens of cement plants across Canada, where it would reduce the consumption of normal fossil fuels, governments decided to burn it in incinerators where they would use fossil fuels to support the flame and where no use would be made of the energy produced. Naturally the process would be very expensive, and naturally the so-called ecologists who came up with the idea would collect the profits.
Because there were very few incinerators most PCB's would have to be trucked long distances to reach them, and because humans are not perfect some would be spilled in transit. We saw one example of what that could mean in April of 1985 when a transformer being hauled from Ontario to Alberta developed a leak and dripped PCB on the Trans Canada highway between Thunder Bay and Kenora, Ont.
The total amount leaked was a much less than one percent of the PCB sprayed every year on that same road few years earlier, but this happened during a provincial election campaign. Further it was a desperate campaign for then-premiere Frank Miller because his predecessor Bill Davis had figuratively stabbed Miller in the back before retiring.
Miller was a chemical engineer and he must have known better, but he was more politician than engineer. He reacted as a politician looking for votes and contemptuous of the facts, rather than as an engineer with a problem to solve.
He had the highway closed and traffic detoured hundreds of miles on a winding two-lane road through Fort Francis. Aside from the danger of detouring heavy traffic over a second-rate road the detour alone did more ecological damage than the spill, because cars and trucks on the detour burned tens of thousands of gallons more gas than they would have on the direct route.
Meanwhile doctors explained the danger with the illustration that if you walked through the whole area of the spill and smoked one cigarette, you would be in more danger from the cigarette than from the spill. This was in the days when cigarettes were not considered dangerous.
Then finally Miller came up with the ultimate solution. Rather than try to wash the spilled PCB off the highway his government would just re-pave the highway and lock the PCB into the pavement. As a chemical engineer Miller knew that the PCB would last longer than the pavement and that it would certainly be released some day, but as a politician he found a way to spend money and to be seen to be doing something about a problem.
Worn-out car and truck tires are also a problem, mostly because there are so many of them. You can't bury them because tires do not decompose underground and -- because of the shape of the tire -- they always seem to trap some air when they are buried. Over time water seeping down through the ground forces the back to the surface. Because of this problem it's illegal to bury used tires almost anywhere in North America.
No problem, because there is an ecologically-sensible solution. Tires are made mostly of oil and carbon black, both of which burn well, and used tires can be used as fuel in cement plants, power plants and other installations. There is a minor problem that if you can't chop the tires up you need a special burner to burn them cleanly, but choppers and burners are available.
So the easy solution is to burn the used tires as fuel and save the oil they replace. It's also one of the few ways to recycle fuel oil.
"We can't recycle oil after we burn it", one tire industry executive explains, "so we make it into tires and recycle it before we burn it."
But not in Ontario where in 1990 a technophobic NDP provincial government made it illegal to burn garbage. By definition used tires are garbage, and for years it was illegal to burn them.
For years Ontario's used tires were collected in giant piles where they provided a hiding place for rats, which raided surrounding farms, and a breeding ground for mosquitoes in the stagnant water they trapped. In 1990 about 14 million tires in one giant storage pile near Hagersville caught fire and that would have solved the problem, except that local firemen tried to put it out.
They could not stop the fire but they did keep it cool enough that the tires did not burn completely and poured out clouds of poisonous smoke, and that rivers of oil boiled out of the tires to pollute surrounding fields.
And other disasters are waiting to happen. According to news reports there are now about 15 million tires stored in one single dump at Franklin, Quebec.
Ontario's law against burning garbage also inspired one of the great political boondoggles of provincial history because the land around Toronto is not only the most expensive real estate in Canada, it is also some of the best farmland. We can't afford to use it to bury garbage but, thanks to the law, garbage has to be buried somewhere.
That set the scene for a royal commission, formed by provincial premiere Bob Rae, to find a new site for landfill. Aside from the months of highly-paid sinecure for the commissioners, all of whom were supporters of chairman Bob, people who knew the commission's plans had the opportunity to profit from land deals because land values dropped precipitously in any area the commission considered using.
The latest eco-scam is electric cars. Like other pseudo-ecological developments they will mean big profits for some and considerable damage to the environment.
First, the obvious. After a short period of down-sizing car engines are getting bigger again, and they are still spewing too much exhaust into our cities. It's also true that while electric cars do produce small amounts of poisonous ozone gas at street level, they do not burn fuel directly.
But now something that should be just as obvious. Electricity has to come from somewhere, and most of the electricity used to charge the batteries of electric cars will be produced by burning fossil fuel. If we're going to burn fuel somewhere, it's more efficient to burn it in cars than in power plants.
Efficiency is important because no matter how clean the emissions you always generate carbon dioxide -- the greenhouse gas that promotes global warming -- when you burn fuel. The more fuel you burn the more carbon dioxide you produce, and the only cure is to burn less fuel.
Emissions count too, of course, and in theory it's easier to control emissions from power plants than from cars. In practice it's very expensive to clean up a power plant, and well worth-while for utilities to hire lobbyists to argue for delays.
Individual customers pay for emissions controls on cars and the auto makers, who make a profit on the emissions controls they sell, don't argue against them.
And cars last only about eight years but power plants last at least fifty years. Because of that most of the cars on the road will always be at least one generation newer, cleaner and more efficient than most power plants.
But even a new power plant can't compete with a car engine, because a power plant can't drive the car directly.
Fuel is burned in a power plant to make steam which drives a turbine which drives a dynamo. Power from the dynamo goes through a grid of wires and transformers to a battery charger, then to a battery and finally to an electric motor. That's ten steps, and power is lost in every one of them. Ontario Hydro won't talk about their efficiency figures but one English study found that the average efficiency of the English power grid, from oil to electric power delivered to houses, was about 10%.
If the rest of the system including the battery charger, the battery and the electric car itself is 50% efficient -- a very high number for any machine -- the overall efficiency of the system which includes the electric car and it's power source is about 5%.
Some power plants will beat the 10% efficiency level, of course, but not by much. Modern car engines convert about 28% of the potential energy of the fuel they burn into useful work, and some proven technology could improve that considerably.
The diesel engines used in most big trucks are about 45% efficient and one diesel engine now in production in Europe is 50% efficient.
If an electric car needs the same amount of energy as a conventional gasoline-powered car, in other words, the plant that provides the power must burn much more carbon-based fuel than a gasoline-powered car. In fact an electric car needs more power and will consume more energy than a gasoline-powered car, because it weighs more.
The European Ford Escort van weighs just over a ton in its original form. An electric version of the same truck, with enough batteries to drive it about 100 miles, weighs 3,200 pounds and would need about 50% more power than the gasoline-powered Escort to produce equivalent performance.
In round figures a battery-electric car will consume five to ten times as much fossil fuel as a gasoline or diesel car, and the internal combustion car does not need power plants, substations or wires. If many people used electric cars we would have to double or triple the power grid we have now.
In my apartment with electric heating I use between 35 and 40 kwh of electricity per day in winter. In terms of energy, that's equivalent to about one gallon of gasoline. If I burn an average of one gallon of gas a day in my car, and try to get the equivalent amount of energy in electricity, Toronto Hydro will have to deliver about twice as much power to my apartment as it does now.
Electric car advocates say that wouldn't matter because cars would be charged at night, when normal power demand is low, but that's not true. Electric cars would be plugged in when people come home from work, and before they start to cook dinner. They would draw the most power in the hours of peak demand.
With electric cars we would use more electric power in residential areas, and be exposed to more leakage. Power leakage from high tension lines, transformers and substations has been linked to cancer and other problems. Power utilities insist that nothing has been proved, but the issue is very much open to question.
And for all the hassles of electric cars they still won't be good for long distances and they won't perform like gasoline cars on short runs. If we're willing to put up with less performance we could put smaller engines in gasoline-powered cars, for performance comparable to an electric on much less fuel with less pollution.
Auto makers say Americans won't buy cars with small engines. They won't buy electric cars either, while the gas-guzzlers the carmakers and the oil companies like are still practical.
But car makers would make more efficient cars and people would buy them if fuel were more expensive. What if the federal government put a surtax of -- say -- $1 a liter on gasoline? That would put our gasoline in the same price range as fuel in most of the developed world.
Such a tax would raise so much money it might even help pay off the national debt. It would also reduce fuel consumption, which would translate into reduced fuel imports and a big improvement in the balance of payments.
Driving would be more expensive, for a few years, but with higher fuel prices to spur development the car makers would soon build more efficient cars which could travel the same distance on less fuel.
The environmental benefits of more efficient cars are obvious. Less fuel burned means less emissions, less smog and less greenhouse effect, and our reserves of fossil fuel would last longer.
More efficient cars would cost more but they would still be cheaper than electric cars. The electric cars now being developed will cost much more to buy than comparable gasoline-powered cars. For the first few years they may cost no more to run because there is no road tax on electricity, but if many people were to use electric cars governments would have to find another way to pay for roads.
Whatever happens electric cars would cost more to run than gasoline cars, and unless we used nuclear power plants to generate the power they would burn more carbon fuels and would cause more pollution than comparable gasoline-powered cars.
And there's no benefit to balance the extra cost, except to the people who hope to sell electric cars and electricity. They would do well but, thanks to the arrogance of technophobic governments who try to regulate things they don't understand, and in part to the ignorance of inexperienced reporters who repeat the claims of promoters without question, the rest of us would pay for it.
Other pseudo-ecologists have done very well with seal hugging and the anti fur business.
It started with the formation of Greenpeace, an activist group headed by a former newsman who, like Goebbels, understood the media and how it works. Working with television, which is much more potent than the newspaper and radio that were Goebbels main vehicles, Greenpeace specialized in the use of memorable video images they described as "mind bombs".
One world famous "mind bomb" was a TV clip of a baby seal being skinned live on the ice. It has since been established that in fact this was a set-up, planned and paid for by Greenpeace, but news stories implied that it was a common occurrence.
In public statements Greenpeace said the Harp seal was an endangered species, and that if the hunt continued it would be extinct in five years. In fact the numbers of Harp seal were increasing at the time.
Greenpeace began it's campaign against seal hunters in 1976 and in 1981 joined up with the International Fund for Animal Welfare to promote a massive write-in anti-fur campaign that virtually destroyed the economy of most Canadian aboriginal groups.
Eskimo live on the seal and in the modern world they used to sell the pelts to pay for the snowmobiles, rifles and other equipment that are now considered necessities in the arctic. When the fur trade crashed their economy crashed, and they had no reasonable alternative business.
As the ban took effect drunkenness, glue sniffing and other problems became rife in native communities. In 11 years before the European ban on seal pelts there were 47 suicides among the 100,000 Inuit known to live in Canada. In the first 11 years after the ban there were 152 suicides.
Meanwhile, most Canadians don't even know that native people exist, let alone that they have problems. A few years ago I met some university students in Winnipeg who were proud of the fact that they had spent the day picketing a fur store. I had been travelling in Northern Manitoba, and had seen the problems the Indians were having. I told the students about the Indians, and found that some of the students thought furs were trapped by "multi-national corporations". They lived in Winnipeg where discouraged Indians are a serious social problem, but they did not realize that Indians had problems or that their picketing of fur stores was a factor.
The Greenpeace-IFAW program also destroyed much of the economy of northern Newfoundland, where seal hunting provided most of the cash income in some villages. When the market for seal pelts died they lost the income, and some of their self respect.
And over ten years the ban has had another effect. Eskimo have been hunting seal for thousands of years and the seal had easily adjusted to survive the kill. For the past 400 years Europeans and later Newfoundlanders killed tens of thousands of adult and baby seals a year without significantly reducing their numbers.
Then came the ban, and no more seals were killed. Now the burgeoning seal population has health problems because, for one thing, the water around Newfoundland is literally so full of seal shit that it's not safe for them to swim.
Seals also seem to have killed off the codfish that was Newfoundland's second main staple. Adult seal can't catch many adult codfish but for at least a year of their lives codfish live as fingerlings, very close to the surface of the Davis Strait, off Labrador, which also happens to be where seals feed. Exploding seal populations in other areas do so much damage to fisheries that wildlife conservation officers in England now kill about 50,000 seals a year to protect fish. One assumes that the meat and pelts are burned or buried as garbage.
Greenpeace is now an international money machine with a budget of many millions of dollars a year. So far there is no evidence that they are willing to share their wealth with the native peoples, and the fishermen of northern Newfoundland, that they beggared to get it.
The latest fuss by the ecologists is about greenhouse gases, and the fuss and the reaction to it may lead to another disaster. The ecologists' argument is that use of fossil fuel releases "greenhouse gases", mostly carbon dioxide, which trap heat in the Earth's atmosphere and cause global warning. At a series of very expensive conferences, the last one in Kyoto, Japan, in the winter of 97/98, most of the advanced countries pledged to reduce the use of fossil fuels.
Oil and coal companies oppose the move and through pressure on the governments they have managed to get the goals set at levels that would not help the problem if it existed, and even so the goals are never met. The main product of the greenhouse gas controversy is fat expense accounts for bureaucrats who spend weeks at international conferences.
On the one hand it's hard to fault them because in fact there is room for question about whether more or less "greenhouse gases" would make much difference to the average temperature of the Earth. I don't pretend to understand the science involved but some scientists I know as personal friends say the matter is very much open to question.
But if there is room for doubt about the greenhouse gases, so what? If there is an effect it is in progress now, and even if we stopped burning fossil fuels now, it's too late to stop it.
But climatologists have been telling us for years that the world was coming to a natural weather change, and now it seems to be happening. If the predictions are right the weather of the past few years -- including disastrous floods in some areas and droughts in others -- will be the norm for the next hundred years or so.
Or worse. Climatologists point out that the last ice age was preceded by about 13,000 years of "warm" weather. Near the end of the "warm" the weather got still warmer for a few years, then apparently took about 10 years to flip from "warm" to an ice age. Since the end of the last ice age we have had about 15,000 years of "warm" weather. If we are warming up for an ice age, it's already too late to worry about "greenhouse gasses".
Whatever happens we can expect major crop failures around the world, but at present we can't predict where or when they will occur. In a rational world we would have started a couple of years ago to diversify crops in the areas now being farmed, bring new areas under cultivation and look for new sources of food that we now ignore.
With a lot of planning and international co-operation we might be able to avoid the major famines that will probably begin within 20 years, but the world is not planning for the weather changes we know are happening now. Instead the ecologists are fighting with the oil companies about "greenhouse gasses", and government pompocrats solemnly pontificate on emission standards that will probably never be adopted, would not be obeyed if they were adopted, and would not make much difference if they were obeyed.
Ecologists pretend to worry about the future of the world, and some of them probably do. Unfortunately some professional ecologists seem to worry more about where their next grant is coming from, and a lot of people seem to see the future of the world as a question of their personal economics rather than the survival of the human race.
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