Environmentalism is nearing retirement age

This weekend (Saturday) will mark the anniversary of the release of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring on September 27, 1962. According to the History Channel, the book “is often viewed as the beginning of the modern environmentalist movement in America.” If so, then the environmentalist movement is now 63 years old.

Perhaps it should consider retirement?

InfluenceWatch has profiles of all the major environmental groups. A read through the profiles leads to the conclusion that retirement would be a good idea.

You had one job…

Carson’s book title implied that overuse of chemicals, such as the insecticide DDT, would kill so many birds that we could one day have a spring without hearing them sing and squawk. DDT in particular was plausibly blamed for softening the shells of bald eagle eggs and nearly driving America’s symbolic mascot to extinction. Silent Spring and the early environmentalist movement share credit for the nationwide phase out of DDT, and the ensuring recovery of the eagle population.

Once rarely seen by most Americans, bald eagles became so ubiquitous that they were removed from the endangered species list in 2007.  Saving the bald eagle was the iconic major achievement of the environmental movement. “The recovery of the bald eagle is one of the most well-known conservation success stories of all time,” reports the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.

But the environmentalist agenda didn’t age well after that.

Today, the movement Rachel Carson supposedly started rakes in billions of dollars annually, and it uses the loot to oppose nearly all forms of energy that don’t spin a wind turbine or heat a solar panel. In addition to providing only intermittent power, these weather dependent sources of energy also—ironically—harm wildlife. Wind turbines in particular are notorious for killing eagles, many other raptors, bats and more.

Environmental Progress founder Michael Shellenberger addressed this concern in his 2020 Congressional testimony:

The rapidly spinning blades of wind turbines act like an apex predator that big birds never evolved to deal with. The wind industry claims that house cats kill more birds than wind turbines. But cats mainly kill small, common birds like sparrows, robins, and jays, whereas wind turbines kill big, threatened, slow-to-reproduce species like hawks, eagles, owls, and condors.

And because big birds have much lower reproductive rates than small birds, their deaths have a far greater impact on the overall population of the species.  For example, golden eagles will have just one or two chicks in a brood, and usually less than once a year, whereas a songbird like a robin could have up to two broods of three to seven chicks each year.

The ironies for modern environmentalism don’t end there. Weather dependent wind and solar energy also chew up far more land than our most reliable energy sources. Shellenberger also addressed this:

The problem with renewables is physical. The dilute nature of sunlight means that solar projects require large amounts of land and thus come with significant environmental impacts. This is true even for the world’s sunniest places. California’s most famous solar farm, Ivanpah, requires 450 times more land than its last operating nuclear plant, Diablo Canyon.

These quantities are supported by the best available scholarship. Vaclav Smil, a widely-respected energy scholar, has shown that it would take 25-50 percent of all land in the US to go 100 percent renewable. Today, the US uses just 0.5 percent of its land for energy. In 2009, Cambridge physicist David MacKay showed that providing energy to the UK with 100 percent renewables would require a greater area than the landmass of the entire country.

So, the modern environmental movement supports eagle slaughtering, inefficient wind turbines that chew up hundreds of times more of the environment than reliable energy such as nuclear. This is a “you had one job” moment, and they’ve been failing.

The InfluenceWatch profiles

In a final irony, nearly all of the major environmental NGOs also oppose nuclear energy. In addition to emitting no pollutants nor carbon dioxide emissions, nuclear power is the most reliable source of electricity we have and functionally limitless.

The list of supposed environmentalist NGOs opposed to nuclear energy includes even groups with names tied to the movement founder: Rachel’s Network and the Rachel Carson Council.

InfluenceWatch has full profiles of all the major environmentalist NGOs, including those few—such as The Nature Conservancy—that wisely endorse expanded deployment of nuclear energy.

But most others should now be described as “anti-energy” groups, rather than “environmentalists.” Here are 25 examples of the Influence Watch profiles of some of the richest such groups:

• World Wildlife Fund
• World Resources Institute (WRI)
• Environmental Defense Fund (EDF)
• Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC)
• Sierra Club
• Rocky Mountain Institute
• League of Conservation Voters (LCV)
• GRID Alternatives
• Southern Environmental Law Center
• Greenpeace
• Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP)
• Center for Biological Diversity (CBD)
• Taproot Earth
• Earth Island Institute
• Climate Policy Initiative (CPI)
• 350.org (National)
• Scenic Hudson, Inc.
• Environmental Working Group (EWG)
• Alliance for Climate Education
• Friends of the Earth
• Climate Reality Project
• Conservation Law Foundation
• Environment America
• Surfrider Foundation
• Earth Day Network

There are dozens of others profiled in InfluenceWatch, perhaps hundreds more. The most recent combined annual revenue of just those listed above exceeded $2 billion. The first six names on the list above each reported annual revenue well in excess of $150 million.

Stupid rich and no longer doing their job. Yeah, it’s time to retire.