Energy, Power and the Environment 
By Robert Maynard

One theme that seems to be popping up at several of the town meetings held by Tom Licata and "Vermonter’s for Economic Health" is that deregulation to help our economic health would come at a price. Political figures at these meetings constantly raise the dire possibility that doing so would reverse the environmental gains that we have enjoyed. The unstated assumption is that Vermont’s rural natural beauty is mostly a result of such regulations.

The truth of the matter is that North America as a whole has been moving in a relatively more "green" direction since the start of the industrial revolution "despite" all of the regulations.  That sounds a bit counter-intuitive, so I would like to refer the reader to "The Bottomless Well: The Twilight Of Fuel, The Virtue Of Waste, And Why We Will Never Run Out Of Energy" by Peter W. Huber, a former mechanical engineering instructor at MIT and a senior fellow of the Manhattan Institute and Mark P. Mills, a physicist, and founding partner of a venture fund, Digital Power Capital, for a more detailed explanation.

In the agriculture based economy, which so many of the "Greens" are nostalgic over, we had to use a lot of land to grow hay, and other feed for animals like horses and oxen that were in essence our "energy conversion hardware".  We also had to clear a lot of land to use trees as a source of heat.  This caused a massive "deforestation" of the North American continent.  With the advent of hydrocarbon based fossil fuels and the internal combustion engine, we were able to do away with the need for horses to provide our "horsepower" and clearing of land to use trees to heat us.  This has resulted in the process of "reforestation".  We are not yet to the point of forest cover that we were when European settlers first came here, but we are headed in that direction.  Much of the third world has never made this leap and is still using animal dung, wood, etc. to heat themselves.  This generates pollution FAR more toxic than anything produced by industrial processes.  There is also a lot of deforestation going on in the developed world.  Of course one of the major reasons for this is the restrictions to development being forced on third world nations by the global environmentalist movement in the name of "protecting the environment". North America, on the other hand, is one of the few places where there is actually a "carbon sink".  By this, I mean that there is more carbon being absorbed into the earth by plant life than there is being given off by various processes.

Vermont in particular has benefited environmentally from the reforestation. As John McClaughry and Frank Bryan point out in "The Vermont Papers", Vermont was at one time largely deforested and covered by pastureland. They talk about Vermont "leapfrogging" the Industrial Age into the Information Age in a section entitled "The Leapfrog Theory". In short, as Vermont moved from being a largely agrarian based economy, pastureland converted to woodland as farming and logging became less central to our economy.

The emerging new technologies promise an even greener future. Digital electronics technology is spearheading an electrification of the U.S. economy. Electricity is a lot cleaner than fossil fuels.  Again, this is in spite of, not because of the busybody regulators.  The advances in technology that make such progress possible have always been unforeseen.  The likelihood that regulators would have the foresight to see which combination of fuel and energy conversion technology is the most conducive to real progress is about 0%.  It is better to leave this up to the trial and error of the market and scientific discovery process than politically locking up our resources in pursuing a path that could be a dead end.

Likewise, the reforestation talked about above never would have taken place if the environmental extremists had their way. This is because of the widespread ignorance regarding energy and power. The real issue is the energy conversion process that we must use to unlock the stored chemical energy in a fuel to useful power that will provide us with heat, transportation or electricity.  Extracting and refining a fuel is only part on the process.  There is a whole layer of hardware required to convert potential chemical energy into useful power.  This is where most of the expense and a lot of the environmental impact lies and is why so-called "free" or "green" fuels are anything but.  There is a reason why oil has been such a dominant fuel for so long that has nothing to do with some conspiracy on the part of OPEC or the oil companies.

Until now, the process of converting the potential stored energy in fossil fuels like oil into usable power has been more feasible and less expensive than any other alternative. That is starting to change with the development of the above mentioned new technologies.

Change is coming, but should not be driven by the wave of a magic wand by regulators in Washington D.C., or Montpelier, who know next to nothing about the whole energy/power dynamics.

In short, the next time one of our political figures informs you that we can not deregulate our economy without sacrificing our environment, just remember that it was the operation of the free market, not the regulations, that made that environment possible.
 

Robert Maynard is the Editor of the True North website