Luxury Green

A few years ago, Sri Lanka, an island nation of 22M located off the southeast coast of India, elected a "woke" President. Gotabaya Rajapaksa, perhaps thanks to a few years steeping in American academia, decided to forcibly transition the nation's agricultural sector to all-organic farming. Emulating Alexander cutting the Gordian Knot, Rajapaksa decreed "a ban on all synthetic fertilizers and pesticides."

Disaster (predictably) ensued. Food and cash crop yields plummeted, food prices soared, and a nation that had already been ravaged by COVID was driven to the point of riot. Rajapaksa had to reverse the diktat, but by then the damage was done.

Organic farming is a "luxury belief." It rests on some science-free and technophobic presumption that "natural" is better, even though "natural" translates to "covered in shit." While the rise in E. Coli outbreaks has not been fully correlated to the rise in organic foods being sold to the public, there is no doubt that organic farming produces significantly lower yields than technological farming does.

Lower yields not only means more land required to grow the same amount of food, it means more work required per unit food, i.e. less productivity, and therefore lower living standards.

Unfortunately, those who embrace luxury beliefs are often so affluent that they don’t feel the pinch. The costs are usually felt the most by the poorer classes. Rich first worlders have the disposable income to pay extra for food they think is healthier, but feeding the world should not be predicated on the ample disposable income of a tiny fraction of its population.

Unfortunately, people don't like to accept that their fantasies don't work, so "organic" continues to be a talking point for first-worlders looking to tell the third world how to live. The same is true for other parts of the green agenda, notably the war on carbon energy.

Guyana discovered large reserves of oil off its coast in 2015. Prior to that discovery , Guyana had a per-capita GDP of about $5K. Today, that figure is about $18K. America's, by contrast, is $76K.

In an interview with the BBC's Stephen Sackur, Guyana's president was scolded for extracting that oil, with doomsday numbers about how much carbon it would release. President Ali countered by pointing out that Guyana had more carbon-sequestering forest than the entire UK, and that they were preserving that forest.

"Does that give you the right to release all this carbon?" was Sackur's arrogant retort.

President Ali was having none of it, retorting strongly, but he did allow Sackur to control the narrative by responding in climate terms:

Guyana will still be net-zero.

Were it me, I'd have barked back:

What gives you the right to tell my country's people they need to stay poor to serve your agenda?"

This illustrates one of the realities about "green" that, as with organic farming, the luxury believers refuse to consider: The developing world will not keep itself in poverty, no matter how loudly the 0.1% demand it. This is why brute-force decarbonization is not a viable strategy. It requires an abandonment of self-interest and an abdication of leaders' responsibilities to the people they serve.

Green remedies need to be of a "pull" rather than a "push" nature. They need to be economically viable and they need to be reliable. Market forces are inexorable, and they will punish the nations that try to subvert them by mandating more expensive energy and banning cheaper energy in the name of green. No top-down, brute-force "solution" will ever be adapted by enough of the world to achieve the green goal. Africa, South and Central America, almost all of Asia, and much of Eastern Europe aren't going to travel the energy-suicide path that the leaders of US, Canada, and Western Europe are forcing their citizens to walk.

There are places where wind and solar pass the economic test, but at the current level of technology, they remain niche adjuncts. This, I suspect, is why China is growing its solar power production even as it continues to build coal plants at breakneck speed. Of course, an "invention" could change all that, but inventions cannot be predicted, and retooling economies based on the expectation of an invention is a recipe for disaster.

Green remedies must be offered rather than forced. Finding ones that are advantageous is the only way to get the world to adopt them, and, no, that doesn't mean subsidizing them. Subsidies precipitate rent-seeking and moral hazard, and when they run out, that which was subsidized will go away.

All this money being spent on "green" would be better spent on exploiting economies of scale in nuclear power. Modular, cookie-cutter nuclear reactors and plants stand a better chance of passing the economic/reliability tests than wind and solar and the non-existent storage for those intermittent power sources. And, since nations like Guyana will continue to serve their citizens by extracting and exporting oil, the green fantasists have to break free of the delusion that they can coerce a carbonless future.

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A footnote: Biden and the Greens are peddling a narrative that wind and solar are already cheaper than carbon energy, and by extension that resistance to them is based on nothing more than recalcitrance. That the government continues to pour billions into subsidizing them is, of course, not to be mentioned. The assertion is bunk, of course. Environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg ably debunks the bunk here, and reaffirms what I and many others have been saying for a long time: the storage problem is the 850 trillion dollar gorilla in the room.