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Solar installers install solar panels on the roof of a home in San Francisco, California. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
The aspirations of middle class life seem increasingly out of reach for many Americans, with the runaway costs of higher education, healthcare, housing, and the seismic effects of the pandemic on the economy.
In a new lecture series, Walter Russell Mead [[link removed]], Hudson's Ravenel B. Curry III distinguished fellow in strategy and statesmanship, will bring together some of the most thoughtful and unorthodox thinkers of our day to examine the future of the middle class and how U.S. policy can strengthen this cornerstone of American society.
Environmental activist, journalist and author Michael Shellenberger joined Mead to kick off the series and discuss how the high-tech energy policies being championed by today's environmentalists would in fact harm the environment and the middle class. See below for key takeaways from their discussion.
In case you missed it, be sure to watch yesterday's discussion with Assistant Secretary of State (and former Hudson Fellow) Christopher Ford [[link removed]], and join us next week as we look at Europe's role in deterring Chinese and Russian aggression [[link removed]].
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Key Takeaways [[link removed]]
Highlighted quotes from Michael Shellenberger in conversation with Walter Russell Mead:
1. Renewable energy plants could be ecologically devastating:
The problem with renewables is inherent to the physics of the fuel and the case of solar panels and industrial wind turbines, the fuel is sunlight and wind. Those fuels, they call them energy flows, are energy dilute. So you have to spread wind turbines and solar collectors over very large amounts of land. [It would require] about 300 to 400 times more land to generate the same amount of electricity from solar and wind, as it would be from natural gas or a nuclear plant. [Scientist and policy analyst] Václav Smil found that going to 100% renewables in the United States would require increasing the amount of land we use for energy from a half a percent to 25 to 50%.
2. It's time to address the "sacred cow" of reducing humanity's footprint:
Humans use about half of the ice-free land on earth. Mostly, it's for food, almost entirely for food. Energy is about a half a percent [of land use]. Cities are about a half a percent. A quarter, an astonishing quarter of the ice-free surface of the Earth is just for pasture and livestock for meat production. When you see species in trouble because we're losing their habitat, it's often to livestock and pasture.
It's very hard to convince people not to eat meat or to stay poor, so the easiest way to [reduce land use] is to concentrate the meat production. You can reduce the land for reproduction by 99%. Concentrating [livestock] is the way that you wish you would do for conservation perspective. Well, that's the exact opposite of what the green foodie movement has proposed. The good news is that we have reduced an area almost the size of Alaska in terms of meat production over the last 20 years. So some of these trends are going in the right direction.
3. The middle class absorbs the economic burden of renewables:
Beyond the ecological damage caused by renewables, they just make electricity expensive. California's electricity is six times more expensive than the rest of the United States. Germany's electricity grew 50% over the last 15 years. France has electricity that's 10 times less carbon intensive, and it costs about half as much as Germany’s, just because France is nuclear and Germany renewables. So I just think renewables were a mistake, a huge gigantic error of the human species.
4. The suburbs aren't that sprawling (and are key to the social contract):
Cities and suburbs are less than 1% of the Earth's surface. If you're worried about nature, then you should worry about reducing the amount of land we use for farming and ranching and agriculture. For me, the heart of the social contract is a shared understanding of how you're going to get some amount of extensification through suburbanization and exurbs and have this density inside the cities.
We're going to have apartments for when you're in your 20's and maybe 30's, and you're working in San Francisco or New York or whatever. You're dating and you're not married. Then when you turn 40 and you have kids, then you might want to have a backyard, then you might go to the suburbs. There's some way to accommodate these things. Some people might stay in a city their whole lives, but we are seeing this divide, this inequality grow between this uber rich 1% knowledge class and the service economy workers who are really squeezed, which is causing the hollowing out of cities.
5. Banning straws is no replacement for economic growth in protecting the environment:
There’s that woman who famously pulled this plastic straw out of a sea turtle’s nose. She's a marine biologist and the video goes viral. So everybody bans plastic straws. Well, as you can imagine, plastic straws are not a significant amount of plastic waste.
But then you go, "Well, how do you solve the plastic waste problem?" That's where it's simple. You have to have a waste management system, which means you have to have a developed economy, which means you need to grow, you need prosperity. [Developing countries’] first priority for waste management is human waste, then roads and electrical wires next. So they can power their factories, and have cities, and all the amenities. Then they get to the waste collection stuff closer to the end of their development process.
Quotes have been edited for length and clarity
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Go Deeper: Strengthening the U.S. Economy
Read [[link removed]]
Strengthening U.S. Manufacturing and Protecting Vulnerable Mineral Supply Chains [[link removed]]
Mineral resources have undergirded the strength of the manufacturing sector for over 200 years. In a new policy memo, Hudson Senior Fellow Tom Duesterberg argues that the U.S. must pivot to protect its mineral supply chains and technological lead in the pandemic era.
Listen [[link removed]]
The Realignment Podcast Ep. 39: Michael Shellenberger's Alternatives to the Green New Deal [[link removed]]
Michael Shellenberger, environmentalist activist, founder and president of Environmental Progress, joins The Realignment podcast to make the pro-nuclear, anti-Green New Deal case for confronting climate change.
Read [[link removed]]
Bringing the Factories Home [[link removed]]
Any strategy to reshore American manufacturing has to integrate the expertise of America’s private-sector labor unions, notes Hudson Senior Fellow Arthur Herman in The Wall Street Journal.
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