Breaking Green Chains

Dr. Michael R. Fox is a member of the Grassroot Institute's Board of Scholars specializing in science, energy, and climate change issues. Now retired and living in eastern Washington, he has nearly 40 years experience in the energy field. He's also taught chemistry and energy at the university level. His interest in conveying scientific ideas to the general public has led to several awards, hundreds of articles and speeches and numerous appearances on television and radio talk shows. Dr. Fox sat down with Grassroot in Tom McAuliffe to discuss the timely issues of climate change, global warming, and the proposed solutions to any real or perceived environmental problems. 

GIR: Do you feel there is any correlation between pollution and climate/environmental change?

FOX: My feelings are irrelevant and I try to keep them that way. I know of no evidence that "pollution" causes climate change, certainly not on a global scale. People need to provide evidence (not hearsay, appeals, ideas, etc.) if they think otherwise. Nor am I aware of pollution causing environmental change. Certainly, there have been many instances of pollution on local levels, from the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland in the 1960s to raw sewage being dumped into Lake Washington and the Big Wood River in Idaho, but many of these have been cleaned up and such operations continue. According to the EPA, both the air quality and the water quality in the United States have increased dramatically over the past 30 years. Only prosperous nations can afford to do that, and America has been the leader. Many environmental scare stories have turned out to be baseless, costing many lives and billions of wasted dollars. It continues to this day.

GIR: How did caring for the environment--and one can define that with everything from picking up litter and recycling to solar water heaters, banning DDT etc. and man made pollution--get morphed into climate change and ideas like cap-and-trade?

FOX: Who knows. As a former member of the Green Party, today's 'greens' have changed into left-wing political activists who in large measure despise our freedoms and free-market capitalism. They've transformed the green movement into a left-wing activist organization, with entirely different agendas. They have political agendas. I have written on this before and I also interviewed Patrick Moore, founder of Greenpeace, when I lived in Hawaii. Moore makes the same observations as I do. I encourage your readers to Google Patrick Moore and read his work. People might also want to notice this alarming quote from the U.N. guru on global warming:

"Isn't the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn't it our responsibility to bring that about?"
-- Maurice Strong, head of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and Executive Officer for Reform, Office of the UN Secretary General (from The Environmentalists' Little Green Book, ISBN 0-615-11628-0)

A few of my professional nuclear colleagues attended the Rio Conference and were there when Strong made this outrageous statement. Sadly, it was met with thundering applause from the crowd, which included many from America's green organizations. I see the Hawaii state legislature and many on the mainland joining--wittingly or unwittingly--in this horrendous U.N. Agenda, which in my humble opinion is why the nuclear power option is never mentioned. The nuclear option works too well, with its environmental advantages and very high energy densities... and they [the greens] and their media sympathizers work very hard at keeping the public scared of this solution to our power needs.

The greens really want to cripple the economy of the U.S. by any means possible, through litigation, taxation, and regulation. This has little to do with a cleaner environment. This is why they oppose fossil fuel electrical energy sources, nuclear energy sources, and even hydro sources here and around the world. These programs are all masked in environmental catastrophic rhetoric, mostly false, but the agenda is very real. This has proven to be a quite successful strategy since the last two generations of Americans have become math and science illiterates. Unfortunately, to a great extent the media these days are little more than green lapdogs. Regrettably, about 30 other nuclear nations are pressing on into the future without any leadership from the United States. We have become lousy, unreliable energy partners.

GIR: How does one explain more and more powerful storms, droughts, climate temperature changes, and weird weather?

FOX: In spite of the alarmist rhetoric, there is no indication of more powerful storms, more droughts, or weird weather. Over the last one million years there have been about 600 periods of warming and about 600 periods of cooling. It is an ongoing natural process very likely involving the sun and its varying irradiance, varying sunspots, varying solar magnetic fields, and varying solar winds. These have nothing to do with manmade CO2. And by the way, 97 percent of atmospheric CO2 is from natural, not man-made sources.

GIR: Some say those who are not believers in man-made global climate change should not even bother with the argument because the public has become so brainwashed about it, but rather should concentrate the focus on opposing the big government “solutions” to this real or perceived environmental problem.

FOX: I agree! What they really want is to monitor and control our daily lives and to establish top down control of our lives by passing laws and regulations that tell us what we can and can't do. But before and if we proceed it must be based on three vital things: evidence, evidence, evidence!

GIR: What do you think of the latest fad of wind power and the whole idea of green energy?

FOX: It's all spurious as can be. Wind power is bogus as can be. I have written quite a bit for HawaiiReporter.com on wind energy, including an analysis of T. Boone Pickens' program. Readers should also Google Glenn Schleede and read some of his articles.

GIR: What is your favorite book on the subject of climate change and global warming?

FOX: There are a number of excellent books. Czech Republic President Vaclav Klaus' recent book, Blue Planet in Green Shackles, is excellent. Klaus lived under communism for most of his life and views today's environmentalism as nothing more than left-wing tyranny, which is something he knows a lot about. There are also some wonderful summary reports on the subject.

GIR: We hear a lot about CO2... what is it and where is it coming from?

FOX: The Chinese are the largest emitters of man-made CO2, not total or natural CO2, and there's a big difference. The largest of the known emitters of natural CO2 include volcanoes, decomposition of plant materials, changes in land use, etc. Man-made sources emit about 7 gigatons CO2 per year. We do know that atmospheric CO2 is very constant, very well mixed, (plus or minus 4 percent) from pole to pole. We humans have yet to identify all such natural sources and to quantify them. For example, one study of termites estimates that there are 1500 lbs of termites per person in the world. That's a lot of termites and every one of them is a source of CO2 (from their digestion of cellulose). Such sources have not been clearly identified, and Hawaii would be a great place to start! There are thousands of species of termites globally, all of them eating cellulose and excreting CO2! And it's all largely irrelevant since CO2 is being shown to have little impact on global temps. There are large variations in the global temperatures, while the increases in CO2 are slow, continuous, with little variations. Other forces (such as the sun) are obviously involved.

GIR: Like most places, in Hawaii we want to keep our islands both clean and with abundant energy. Is that realistic?

FOX: If you really want to keep your islands clean with abundant energy, do what those ships in Pearl Harbor do. Use more nuclear energy, tailored and sized for each island. Those naval reactors provide electrical energy, the power to launch 30 ton aircraft, the energy to provide fresh air oxygen (electrolysis of water) and provide fresh water (reverse osmosis of water) when submerged for weeks at a time or at sea for months. New and smaller plants are being designed for such small populations and applications.

GIR: Is an electric vehicle anywhere in our future?

FOX: Transportation energy or rather battery technology for autos has improved a lot over the past few years and is now enough to provide 200 miles of travel between charges which would be perfect for the islands. I'm currently consulting on such a project. Of course, a lot of infrastructure needs to be designed, built, and ironed out, but this technology is on the way. By the way, as the fleet of cars and trucks become more electrified, there will be a significant need for more electrical generation to charge the thousands of car batteries. Will Hawaii build more fossil plants for that, or maybe reconsider the nuclear option? We'll see. The power company trying to ration electricity is certainly not the answer. Hawaii's citizens need to keep HECO out of their houses and lives. Like big government, it is simply a menacing intrusion into everyday lives. Likewise, no tax incentives are needed to switch to new greener cars. If they can make them economical to buy and operate, customers will buy them. It's that simple. Hopefully someone will also tell Obama that the costly cap-and-trade fiascos are falling apart from the EU to New Zealand and Australia. And hopefully state legislatures and the EPA will do what is being done around the world and re-examine all of the global warming issues and their panicked responses to the exaggerations of the green movement.

GIR: As for the future?

FOX: I believe we may be on the brink of major environmental history! We may be near the end of the global warming scare stories, which have been shown to be filled with exaggerations, misrepresentations, horrendous political agendas, and junk science of many types. We may even be near the end of the environmental movement as we know it. Their exaggerations have cost millions of lives, billions of dollars, impacted foreign policy, energy policy, education policy, science policy, and ruined the careers of many who have tried to oppose them for insisting upon honest science. While in some isolated cases they've done some good, and they've made some lovely calendars and coffee table books, all things considered they've been terribly destructive. Too many costly policies have been made on the myths of their exaggerations. The destruction of the green movement is a worthy goal over and above the reconsideration and end of the horrendous impacts of the costly and wasteful CO2 mitigation efforts. Indeed both would be very well deserved.