In this collection of articles, an environmental scientist traces a journey through the wilderness of environmental politics. In his travels, Dr. Edward Krug developed a unique perspective on vital areas of the environmental issues, making him critical of both sides of the environmental debate. Environment Betrayed delves into numerous environmental issues and into environmentalism itself, presenting both Dr. Krug's opinions and the well-documented opinions of others who were active participants in the environmental arena. Dr. Krug has worked as an environmental scientist since the early eighties, and much of the research and information included here originated in the eighties and nineties. Despite this gap of time, defenders of modern Western civilization don't seem to recognize the nature of the environmental war, let alone many of its details. By raising issues, environmentalists also define the battlefield-that is, the context of thought. Krug cites credible sources on both sides of the debate with varying perspectives on where things stand in this conflict. Only by gaining a clear understanding of what's at stake can we truly grasp the numerous environmental issues swirling around us and what they will mean for our future.
Environment Betrayed
The Abuse of a Just CauseBy Edward C. KrugiUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2012 Edward C. Krug
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4759-1126-8Contents
Preface........................................................................................viiWhy Am I Doing This?...........................................................................1Acid Rain: Forests and Fish....................................................................5Assessment of the Theory and Hypotheses of the Acidification of Watersheds.....................20Where's the Ozone Problem?.....................................................................26The Great Lakes are Dying .....................................................................38Climate History Invalidates Global Warming Models..............................................42Pinatubo and the 1992 Ozone Scare..............................................................59Hey-Hey, Ho-Ho, West-Ern-Civ-Has-Got-To-Go.....................................................64Mercury Madness................................................................................90Don't Believe any of it........................................................................99Populution.....................................................................................102More on Populution.............................................................................110More on Ozone..................................................................................133The Perfect Natural State: Surface Waters......................................................147Postindustrial Green World Order...............................................................161Meanwhile Back in the Ussra....................................................................178Industry's Clean Air Act Blues.................................................................181Opportunity to Win Back the West...............................................................183"Volcanoes" of the Atmosphere..................................................................211Ota Updates....................................................................................231The True State of the Planet...................................................................238Building the Environmental Republic............................................................257Wetlands.......................................................................................274Farewell Reflections...........................................................................294
Chapter One
WHY AM I DOING THIS?
Reprinted from Environment Betrayed 1(1):7 (Dec. 1993).
The answer lies in who I am. Having grown up in New Jersey, I saw that man can damage nature—parts of New Jersey resemble the surreal industrial moonscape of smoke and fires pictured at the beginning of the movie The Blues Brothers. While I now oppose environmentalism, originally I didn't perceive anything wrong with it. Being technically oriented, I didn't read the popular literature back then. Whether working for the New Jersey Bureau of Water Policy and Supply or reviewing permits for Ralph Nader's Public Interest Research Group, my involvement was straightforward: meeting surface water quality and wastewater discharge standards.
However, things changed after I earned a PhD and became the state of Connecticut's scientific acid rain expert in 1981. I saw that "environmental" objectives for acid rain were being promoted by doomsday data fabricated out of thin air. For example, in 1980, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) asserted that the average Northeastern lake had been acidified a hundredfold over the last forty years as the result of acid rain. Not to be outdone, in 1981, the National Academy of Sciences asserted that the last forty years of acidification would be repeated again—but in only nine years, by 1990 (National Research Council, 1981). Both of these claims were false, as were similar claims being made for acid rain damage to forests. In short, the public was being misled into believing that acid rain was an enormous environmental crisis that merited controls proportionate to the "crisis."
Quite worried, I went to others in the environmental movement with the concern that we were misplacing precious resources, and doing so at the expense of credibility for environmental concerns. To my shock, environmental leaders attacked me (Anderson, 1992) in a manner that onlookers likened to the inquisition of Galileo (Eyde, 1992). However, the Ed Krug story is but part of a greater Green jihad against scientific truth (e.g., Krug, 1992, 1993).
A 1989 UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) presentation on global warming made me realize that what was happening in acid rain was not unique. The IPCC scientists assumed that the global warming models actually worked and, using first principles, determined that a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide would increase agricultural productivity by 15 to 40 percent, depending upon the region of the world. Similarly, global warming should increase average forest productivity (IPCC, 1989).
I nearly fell out of my chair before remembering that historians and paleoecologists call the warmer periods of the recent past "Climatic Optima," that is, global warming is "good" and global cooling is "bad." However, as with acid rain, the good news about global warming was censored out, along with the information that shows that the global warming models, like the acid rain models, don't work in the first place. And so 1989 was when I came to know that environmentalism is fundamentally flawed.
As the late great Oxford University Don C. S. Lewis observed, the greatest evils are committed by perverting virtue, be it peace (the Pax Romana of the Roman Empire), equality (the human face of Communism of the Soviet Empire), or nature (the perfect natural state of the rising new Green world order). Purity of goals blinds well-meaning adherents, be it the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics murdering 66 million of its citizens to end the exploitation of man by fellow man (Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, Vol. II, 1975) or environmentalists trying to do the absurd: implement conservation and pollution control using a philosophy incapable of generating these concepts in the first place (Krug, 1993). If you believe that nature is a Garden of Eden (Gore, Earth in the Balance, 1992, p. 144), then you will always find something wrong with whatever we do because all activities—even conservation—have some sort of impact. Take energy as an example.
Coal is now considered a "dirty fuel" because of acid rain. But we really can't replace it with another fossil fuel due to global warming. Nuclear power? No, they say. It is unsafe, and don't try making it safe either—they want us to use renewable sources of energy.
Okay, but when we put in a dam, the Greens complain that we are changing a river into a lake. Geothermal energy is opposed based on aesthetics. Charles Kuralt did a Christmas special a few years ago entitled "Gifts We Give Ourselves." One of these "gifts" was stopping geothermal power production in Oregon. How "nice" (also see the televised May 12, 1992, hearing of the Senate Energy Committee). Windmills? Again, aesthetics—and in California, Greens complain it kills birds.
It was the reaction to the announced possibility of cold fusion—a glimpse at year 3000 technology (even Star Trek: The Next Generation uses force...
