Public School Teachers are Overpaid
(This essay is based on a 2005 study. The figures certainly have changed since then, but the basic truth has not.)
Every day of every year, we hear pronouncements from public
school teachers, their unions, their allies in the community, and their patrons
in the Democrat party that teachers need higher salaries. This is even repeated
by Republicans. “Salaries are too low. We know that,” said Laura Bush. Public
campaigns, friendly media articles and editorials, and letters to newspapers
from members of the school establishment and their backers bombard the public
with stories about the woeful state of teacher pay.
If only it were so.
The whole intent of these campaigns is to insure an
ever-growing flow of money into the public school bureaucracy and its unions,
and subsequently into the coffers of the Democrat party. They are nothing more
than wealth-appropriation campaigns in favor of expanded socialism. When school
budgets are put up for public vote, budget increases always are touted as
necessary “for the children” when in fact today they are overwhelmingly “for the
teachers” as public education declines in quality and union activism replaces
it. But this is typical socialism: As always, unions come first,
while the company and its products (or in this case, the schools and their
students) are way down the list in importance.
According to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, which
compiles data on salaries for all American workers, the average public school
teacher in the United States earned $34.06 per hour in 2005, or roughly the
equivalent of $68,000 per year if the teacher worked year-round, which none do.
This puts them at the higher end of
middle-class salaries in
And in addition to their high salaries, it is critical to
remember that:
A) Public school teachers are government employees, usually
unionized,
who get some of the most generous benefit and pension plans in middle-class
America, which ultimately add big economic benefits to teachers’ lifetime
incomes;
B) Teachers and other state and local
government employees in 15 states including big states like
C) A high percentage of public school teachers take early retirement when they
are in their 50s, some in their early 50s. Since many are not required to pay
into Social Security, they are covered under private pension plans which are
proven to return 5 to 9 times as much wealth as Social Security does (search the
internet for information on the Galveston, Texas Social Security privatization
experiment to learn more).
If these teachers' private pension plans do not provide enough retirement
income, the taxpayer makes up the difference, which can amount to large
subsidies over long periods of time, particularly for early retirees. This
happens even though taxpayers already paid into retirement plans for those
teachers during those teachers’ working lives.
And since private-sector employees are heavily burdened with
school taxes throughout their working lives, they often have to work beyond the
age of 65 in order to subsidize public school teachers in every way, including
those who retire in their 50s.
D) Early retirements require school districts to devote large
amounts of money to training new teachers. And new teachers have a notoriously
high dropout rate in the public schools, meaning that the money is often wasted.
E) Long vacation periods, particularly in summer, add to the
quality of life for school teachers, another major hidden ‘benefit’. These
vacation periods allow teachers to relax, to travel, to spend more time with
friends and family, or even to earn extra income.
F) The median annual public school teacher salary in 2006 was
$48,316, according to BLS, for only roughly 9 months of work. Many American
struggle to earn much less working a full year.
G) The average public school teacher hourly pay rate in 2005
was 61% higher than the average hourly rate of private-school teachers, even
though those private-school teachers produce hugely better results for much less
money.
So obviously, money is not the problem in public education. Teachers are making lots of money. What teachers do, however, is mount ongoing campaigns for more money and higher school budgets, appealing to taxpayers’ emotions in order to get regular pay increases and to accumulate more union wealth and power.
In highly unionized cities, other school employees like bus
drivers, food-service workers and janitors are included under the union
umbrella, driving up education budgets dramatically for taxpayers.
Often teachers will use an emotional tactic like indicating a
doctor’s nice home and claiming that teaching is just as important as practicing
medicine, but that teachers cannot afford to live in such nice homes. This is
typical socialist subterfuge, to plead poverty even though you are making lots
of money, and then to compare your situation with someone in different
circumstances than you. Doctors work much harder and longer, are much more
ambitious than the average public school teacher, take more risks, incur much
more debt and take many more years of training to get to where they are.
In the BLS study, public school teachers are classed as
white-collar workers in the ‘professional specialty and technical worker’ group.
Others in this group include doctors, engineers, architects, registered nurses,
computer scientists, chemists and others.
While the average public school teacher earned $34.06 per hour in 2005, the
average for other workers in their group was $30.66, said the BLS study.
The
Compared to other white-collar workers,
says the Bureau of Labor Statistics, public school teachers in
To earn their salaries, public school
teachers love to explain how they give extracurricular time coaching the
cheerleading team, or
spend many hours at home correcting papers. But according to BLS, the
average public school teacher works 36.5 hours per week, almost 3 hours less than comparable white-collar workers
at 39.4 hours. These hours include time for correcting papers and preparing for
classes during the school day.
And these hours
include paid lunch and rest periods.
Teachers working the fewest hours at
32.6 were found in
The BLS study also found that teachers take home no more work
than others in their white-collar class.
In their white collar group, doctors in 2005 earned an average
hourly pay of 80% more that public-school teachers, and airline pilots earned 186%
more, said BLS.
But editors and reporters earned 24% less than public school
teachers, architects 11% less and economists 1% less.
In the study of 45 metropolitan areas, BLS found that higher teacher pay in those areas had no effect on graduation rates, and that higher pay is not correlated to academic excellence in any way.
Despite the high salaries and great benefits offered to public school
teachers, the public education system experiences great difficulty finding new
teachers. The reason is simple: Prospective teachers know how frustrating,
union-driven and bureaucratic the system is, and how it automatically filters
out creative, individualistic or ambitious people, insuring an increasingly
expensive and increasingly mediocre system for future generations.
Public education is one of the primary heartbeats of American
socialism. Through government/liberal control of the public schools, children
are indoctrinated about certain select, negative facts of American history;
about single approaches to social and political problems from the Democrat side of
the spectrum; and about issues like homosexuality, the environment and abortion, while genuine,
objective subjects like math and science are marginalized.
Should public school teachers be compensated at the high rates
of pay they receive today?
Possibly, but only if they are
performing very well. And the way the system is performing today is no indication
that teachers deserve the pay they are receiving
at the direct expense, dollar for dollar, of the
overburdened American taxpayer.
Are there good, diligent people in the public education system
who care deeply about their students?
Certainly there are some. But those who
attended the excellent public schools in the 1950s and 1960s know well
that the quality of public education has declined dramatically as union activism
has risen up and consumed the system.
That Weird, Wacky Weather Channel
The Weather Channel, once home to real weather forecasts and related news, today
has become one of American media’s leading cheerleaders for environmental
sophistry and ‘global warming’ (GW) alarmism.
Heidi Cullen, once described as the station’s chief meteorologist has magically
morphed into the station’s chief “climatologist” and has declared that
meteorologists who do not subscribe to the GW theory – and it is just a shaky theory –
should have their American Meteorological Association accreditation lifted.
Imagine that. A purge of weather forecasters! This is part of a bigger tyranny
in which environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that anyone who disagrees
with GW is guilty of “treason”.
It is plain to see the totalitarian leanings of yet another group of leftist
theorists in which you could lose your job or are put on trial for subversive thinking
that threatens “the state”. This is frightful.
Today’s Weather Channel offers programming like Forecast Earth,
a silly pro-ecology broadcast so full of misinformation and spurious claims that
it’s simply unbelievable.
On Forecast Earth’s hour-long program on March 29, 2008 host Natalie Allen
addressed the usual environmental bogeymen like automobile use and carbon
dioxide emissions while broadcasting from the side of a busy highway in order to
remind us of our fallen nature in driving our cars.
Allen opened the show by addressing the concept of the electric car,
which has been promoted for decades now by environmentalists who say: “Look!
There’s no pollution. There’s no tailpipe with nasty emissions coming out. It is
all electric!” And the gullible among us actually believe that this thing is a
good idea.
But even the most cursory investigation proves that this argument is nonsense.
Because the electric car -- which eco-conspiracy-nuts have theorized had all of
its patents bought up and destroyed by the oil companies – is an extremely
inefficient form of transportation. The oil companies need not have spent a
penny conspiring to destroy the electric car. It revealed its flaws long ago and
never has made any inroads into the car market. And here is why:
Electricity is a highly-refined resource. It is not like wood which you can cut
or scavenge in the forest and toss onto a fire to warm your house or cook a
meal. The production of electricity requires a technologically complex and
precise turbine system and conversion process which needs to spin a heavy copper-wire generator in
order to make electricity. This is the way that virtually all of the world’s
electricity is generated. Big generators weight many, many tons.
The spinning can be accomplished by the rushing of falling water over a
hydroelectric dam and through the turbine; by the breezes blowing over a giant
windmill; or, in most cases worldwide, by the power of steam pressure when water is heated to boiling in
what is called a “thermal” power plant, in which the heat source is burning coal
or a nuclear reaction. The steam pressure has energy, just as the steam
emanating from the
top of a pressure cooker could be used to spin a child’s pinwheel.
Once you go through all the steps of making electricity, it should be used for
refined purposes like running a computer or lighting lamps for which there is no alternative source. We should use electricity for powering stereo
systems and TVs and hospital MRI machines, and running all the electric motors in our daily lives, or for
manufacturing processes like mixing, sawing, welding, drilling etc. And on and
on.
To use refined energy like electricity to power a car is nonsense. Because when you go through all
the steps to produce electricity, you lose a tremendous amount of efficiency. In
other words, if you burned coal as the heat source in a generating plant, that
heat energy is “converted”, and the electrical energy that you get out of the power
plant is much less than the raw energy in the coal. In short, you “lose” a lot
of energy in making electricity, just as a cabinet-maker starts with raw wood,
then “loses” a lot of wood in cutting, shaping and drilling it to make an
elegant table.
To look at it anther way: If you took 10 pounds of coal and burned it in a
'thermal' power
plant to make electricity, then used the electricity to run a space heater in
your home, you would have gained vastly more heat out of burning the 10 pounds of
coal directly than you would get out of the electric heater powered by burning
that same 10 pounds of coal. This is why electric heat is so expensive… because
it is the wrong use for electricity.
And this is the way to think about the electric car. Because it too is the wrong
use for electricity. It is much more efficient to use gasoline to power an
automobile because it is a much more direct energy source. And the power in
gasoline is awesome, particularly with the highly efficient internal-combustion
engines we have today. Just think of driving your car at 50 miles per hour up a
long hill. It might burn a cup of gasoline. Now imagine how many men it would
take to push that car up that same hill at 50 MPH. It would take 100 men to
replace that one cup of gasoline.
So therefore, the idea of moving an automobile and its passengers with
electricity is a very expensive and wasteful proposition and actually causes
more pollution than the gasoline-powered car because of all the energy loss in
making electricity in the first place.
What about the “no pollution” aspect of the electric car?
Indeed there is no tailpipe, and there are no carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide
and other emissions like the ones put out by gasoline-powered automobiles. In
the Forecast Earth program, Natalie Allen nods her head in agreement
with an electric car proponent, saying that the car "saves gas" and uses no foreign oil.
But an electric car must account for the “upstream” pollution at electrical generating plants, i.e., if the generating plant burns coal, then there is air pollution from the burning of the coal. So rather than playing conveniently dumb like Ms. Allen, you must account for the “upstream” pollution. And therefore, the electric car indeed pollutes.
Of course, some environmentalists will take it a step further and simply say
that if we put up windmills, that the electricity will be generated by the clean
breezes. But first, windmills never will be able to produce the massive amounts
of electricity needed to power 200 millions cars unless we put up windmills
everywhere. And second, environmentalists already have been some of the
strongest opponents of wind power because of its huge negative environmental
impact (they are big and ugly) on mountaintops and out in the ocean, as they are
proposed off Cape Cod in Massachusetts.
Ms. Allen then went on to praise one experimenter for teaching electric-car hype
to kids from “low income homes, you’re bringing new technology into their
lives.” In other words, not only is this program promoting this bogus technology without
scrutiny, but it is bringing in the usual media/socialist economic theory too, that
environmentalists’ ideas will save our economy, and the poor too. Which is
nonsense. Because it is only cheap, reliable and large-scale energy sources like
nuclear power that will sustain our high standard of living and our energy
supply, not windmills and electric cars.
Was Forecast Earth done after the segment on the electric car?
Heck no! The show was only 20 minutes old!
The program then launched into a segment about the disproved concept of ethanol
and other bio-fuels. Here is a Nikitas3.com editorial from December 2007 about ethanol: (Weather
Channel essay continues below it.)
Ethanol, Busted
If the United Nations referred to your activities as a “crime against humanity”, or if the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development referred to your product as “a cure that is worse than the disease,” you might think about getting into another line of work.
Yet these descriptions are being
pinned on ethanol, an energy source that only a few short years ago was being
seen as yet another panacea for a world needing increasing amounts of power.
Ethanol now has gone from hero to zero faster than just about any other
world-saving idea ever, and this story should be a warning to those who continue
to believe that our energy supply issues can continue to be addressed by “soft”
sources like solar, wind and biomass, because they cannot.
The ethanol problem began with the usual high dose of unreality from the enviro left. Touted as a miracle way to “grow” energy like any other crop, ethanol never was proven in any way, shape or form. First, using corn to make ethanol (alcohol fuel) is simply another form of captured solar energy, which is low-yield to start.
And second, to this day, it never
even has been proven that every 1,000 BTUs of energy invested in making ethanol
(to power the tractors, to make and apply the herbicides and pesticides, to
transport the crop to the distillery, to power the distillery) even produces
1,000 BTUs of ethanol energy in return! Even the most optimistic assessment has
said that ethanol returns only 3.6 times as much energy as it consumes, which is
piddling considering that an oil well can consume, say, a thousand units of
energy to be drilled, but then can return 1,000 trillion units of energy in the
oil extracted.
This is key to understanding the
ethanol scam. The only reason that ethanol has stood even this brief test of
time is because government subsidies have propped it up in the market. You could
make fuel from chicken livers with enough government largesse.
Touted as a way to revitalize rural
economies, ethanol now is being seen as a road to ruin. By its very nature, it
consumes itself: As increasing demand for corn for ethanol conversion pushes up
prices for corn, it makes food more expensive (because the supply of feed corn
for beef cattle, dairy cattle, hogs and chicken also rises), and has caused the
price of milk to rise 14%nationwide in the last year. Equally bad, it has pushed
up the price of American corn exports to hungry third-world nations.
But the worst of it is this: As
demand for corn rises with ethanol production increases, and as this pushes up
the price of corn, the price of making ethanol itself also can and will rise
substantially, and its production easily can become economically unsustainable
as has happened in Europe with rapeseed, the crop used to make biodiesel fuel
(see below).
The American government today
provides oil refiners a 51 cent credit for every gallon of ethanol that they
blend into their gasoline supplies, to a maximum of 15% ethanol at the pump. The
government also has imposed a 54 cent per gallon tariff on imported ethanol to
protect domestic suppliers. These artificial government props are holding up a
shaky ethanol tent. Ethanol prices peaked at around $5 per gallon in 2005 and
now, with increased production, the prices has slid to $1.85. As ethanol prices
dropped and corn prices were rising, however, profit margins on ethanol fell
90%. All this see-saw volatility in just the first few years of the program is
hardly reassuring news on which to base our future energy supplies. What about
drought or floods?
2007 global ethanol production was
13.4 billion gallons, about half of that American, which represents about 4% of
American fuel consumption.
Now even environmentalists are complaining about ethanol,
and when that happens, you know there are big challenges coming. They are
claiming that too much acreage is being given over to fuel production,
threatening protected lands and harming food supplies. And now ethanol is under
attack for increasing ozone levels, while others are claiming that its use might
actually increase so-called “climate change”. By 2010, it is projected that
ethanol could provide 8% of the
Meanwhile in
Since early 2007, prices for the
crops to make biodiesel have doubled, pushing up the cost per gallon of
biodiesel to almost 175% the price of diesel fuel itself.
And like those protesting ‘green’
fuels worldwide for their impact on land and food resources, Europeans are
becoming anxious that increasing deforestation will be the result in poorer
nations where more money can be made growing ‘green’ energy than in growing
other crops.
What we are seeing all over the
world is the false promise of environmentalism… once again. When Hillary Clinton
said in early 2007 that she was going to “take away” the profits of the oil
companies and invest it in a government program to develop alternative fuels; as
environmentalists have told us for decades how solar and wind power will “free
us" from the oil spigot; when leading Democrats and greenie activists tell us
about the “Manhattan Project” for energy that will help us to develop a new
generation of fuels and cars, you now can look them straight in the eye and say,
“Enough! The facts are out!”
Wind energy has been around for millennia, and is very
inefficient. That is why so little of it is being used, while environmentalists
themselves are some of the biggest protestors of giant wind generators in
If solar energy were so effective, every home in
The hydrogen fuel-cell automobile
works only experimentally and is extremely expensive.
And if ethanol were such a worthy
fuel, we would be using much more of it.
We do not need a “crash” program to
develop new energy resources. We already know what works: Oil, natural gas,
nuclear and coal. Yet the very same people who are trying to shove ethanol and
giant windmills down our throats (and then turning around and protesting them)
are the most adamant protestors about the things that actually do power our
economy efficiently and cleanly. And at the very same time, these same people
hector us endlessly about the bogeyman of “global warming” when in fact the
biggest bogeyman of all is the utterly false promise of endless energy from the
sun, the land and the wind. It is false.
The time is over for any further debate. It is time for us to get serious about our future energy supplies.
After the Weather Channel’s Forecast Earth program glossed quickly over
a
segment on how garbage is going to be somehow transformed into bio-fuel(?!?),
the program launched into one of the most preposterous segments ever seen in
which the host, Dr. Marcus Eriksen, showed a picture of french fries in
boiling oil in order to broach the old home-grown myth of using vegetable oil --
even used fry-o-lator oil from your local hamburger stand -- to power your car.
Eriksen first let slip that you need to spend $1,000 upfront on a special fuel
tank for your car to burn vegetable oil, then never explained the
supply-and-demand situation, that the whole output of used fry-o-lator oil in
any small town is enough to maybe power one car for a week.
Then Eriksen launched into one of the most absurd sequences ever broadcast,
donning safety goggles and showing how you, at home, can mix in a big jar
vegetable oil, methanol (a toxic alcohol fuel) and a catalyst, shake it all
together and then let it sit for a few days(!) until it settles into automobile
fuel on top and glycerine on the bottom of the jar, which you can “compost or…
make into soap or candles.”
Eriksen then claimed that you can make this fuel for about $1 a gallon, which is
nonsense because vegetable oil costs about $6 a gallon minimum wholesale, unless
you’ve corned the used fry-o-lator oil market, in which case the raw material is free unless
you account for the cost of your gasoline to collect it, and your time to
collect and convert it. Then Eriksen concluded that you must make sure to “check with your
local authorities to see if you need a permit, or need to pay any taxes on” your
new miracle fuel.
By this time, of course, most viewers would realize that it’s easier just to go
to Gas N’ Go and fill up. And cheaper too.
Was Forecast Earth over now? Unfortunately, no. We’ve got 20 minutes
more. And now we were subject to the usual 'global warming' harangue hosted by
the esteemed Heidi Cullen herself, along with an analysis of our “carbon
footprint”, the new Scarlet Letter of modern living. “Like it or not, most of
our transportation still is fossil-fuel powered,” Cullen said in opening.
Yes, Dr. Cullen, and what genuine solutions do you have to the problem?
She then went on to recommend “riding bicycles or walking instead of using the
car” and advocated another sham scenario, that massive tree plantings can save
the earth from burning up, that one planted tree can consume as much carbon dioxide
(CO2) as is
produced in one 500-mile ride in your car because, as any fifth-grader knows,
trees and plants “consume” CO2 as their “food” and make it into wood and fiber
and edible crops like corn. She failed to mention that it takes the tree 30
years to grow to that level of CO2 consumption.
And never did Cullen mention that the pristine forests that she and her enviro friends are protecting all over the globe are full of trillions of dead and dying trees that in fact become massive emitters of… you guessed it… carbon dioxide. Because living trees consume CO2 while dying and dead trees emit CO2. That is basic science, which GW alarmists ignore at every turn because science always proves them wrong (see the essay A Simple Primer to Debunking Global Warming accessible from the Nikitas3.com home page). So perhaps first we should plant one tree for every dying or dead tree that exists in an environmentally-protected forest. And then wait 30 years to breathe.
Forecast Earth demonstrates that the Weather Channel has become nothing but a
propaganda arm of the enviro movement. And John Coleman, who founded the Weather
Channel in 1982, is upset with the course of events.
Coleman has asked publicly whether GW alarmist Al Gore is “committing financial
fraud” and has suggested suing Gore and those who are seeking to establish a
system of carbon credits (pollution allowances, determined by arbitrary caps on
energy use) that can be bought and sold on
an open exchange.
Said Coleman: “Since we can’t get a debate (in the pro-GW media), I thought
perhaps if we had a legal challenge and went into a court of law, where it was
our scientists and their scientists, and all the legal proceedings with the
discovery and all their documents from both sides and scientific testimony from
both sides, we could finally get a solid debate on the issue. I am confident
that the advocates of ‘no significant effect from carbon dioxide’ would win the
case.”
Coleman continued: “As you look at the atmosphere over the last 25 years,
there’s been perhaps a degree of warming, perhaps probably a whole lot less than
that, and the last year has been so cold that that’s been erased. I think if we
continue the cooling trend a couple of more years, the general public will at
last begin to realize that they’ve been scammed on this global warming thing.”
Coleman added that carbon dioxide is only about 38 particles per 100,000
particles in the atmosphere, hardly enough to affect climate dramatically,
particularly in light of the fact that there are no accurate measurements of CO2
from history, nor any accurate historical temperature records to compare current
conditions with.
10 Ways that Environmentalists Pollute the Environment and Squander our Resources
People who publicly tout themselves as
‘environmentalists’ are all over on the political left, typically implying
that nobody else cares about the environment, particularly conservatives. Enviros are inextricably entwined with the Democrat party and favor large
government agencies that make energy policies, control the lives of people
through endless laws (one-third of all federal laws passed in the last 10 years
have related to environmental issues) and restrict the way that citizens may use
their land.
Many of today’s so-called environmentalists are not even
interested in the natural environment at all but rather are leftist zealots,
some of them actually hard-core communist activists known as Watermelon
Environmentalists (green on the outside, red on the inside) who wish to
undermine capitalism in general and the American economy in particular. They use
the cover of the eco-movement to impose their agenda.
Never mind that the whole idea of modern-day environmentalism and nature preservation was invented by hunters and fishermen and other rugged outdoor types, most of whom would locate themselves far away from the goofy liberal end of the political spectrum. Never mind that Republican President Teddy Roosevelt was the first “environmentalist” who established the national parks. Never mind that the capitalist railroad ‘robber barons’ helped to establish those parks.
Many conservatives are as strongly environmentalist as any
liberal but in a better and more effective way, and for more rational reasons:
Because conservatives are rational people who make decisions based on facts, not
emotions. For instance, conservatives don’t like windmills because they despoil
the environment; and they favor nuclear power because it is the most efficient
energy source ever invented and therefore impacts the environment least.
In fact conservatives are much more
environmentally-minded than those on the enviro left because they believe that
mankind should be considered when thinking about the environment, while liberal
enviros believe that mankind is an afterthought, or not even a factor at all,
that only nature is to be considered.
The leftists who have commandeered the enviro movement in fact
have taken over what rational people established just as liberals have moved
into churches, courts, professional organizations like the American Bar
Association, the arts, the universities and the media to seize control of those
entities for their own ends, then pushed those ends to the extremes. The halting
of American oil production, nuclear power plant construction and oil refineries
is an extreme position adopted by the left. Throughout history no rational
society has deprived itself of its own resources and technologies until today’s
Democrats have done so.
Genuine environmentalism includes the human environment. Just
think of world history when billions of people throughout the ages, along with
billions today, suffered through their lives at the mercy of nature. That
rational, intelligent people finally created the technologies to give man a
decent standard of living that is insulated from the brutality of nature is
something we all should be thankful for.
But not today’s liberal enviros. They find it only objectionable. They
believe that technology is evil. Al Gore has even has called the internal combustion
engine - the greatest labor-saving device in history - the scourge of mankind.
They also believe that nature is benign, which it decidedly is not. Nature is
brutal. And the only reason some humans see it as benign is because we are so
insulated from nature by modern technology.
It is only conservatives and capitalists who say that we can
have a clean environment and a high standard of living together. Enviros love to
focus only the pristine environment without any consideration for industry,
energy, resources, jobs or growth.
And looking at recent history, we can see how things really
have worked out. Look at how Western man responded to the first century of
industrialization with pollution spewing everywhere, with dirty rivers and air,
and foul factories. He used modern technology to clean up the environment and
today our standard of living is higher than ever based on advancing technologies
that are cleaner than ever. That is a tribute to the innovative nature of modern
technology developed in free nations, primarily Western nations.
Left-wing environmentalists, of course, have contributed zero
to our high standard of living. If you left our fate up to them, they simply
would have shut down all pollution and never re-opened the offending facilities.
Innovative capitalism, on the other hand, has shown us how to reinvent those
facilities with better technology and less pollution.
In fact the policies of leftist environmentalists have in many cases ended up polluting the environment and squandering our resources.
Here are 10 examples how:
1) Environmentalists have
blocked efficient nuclear power. Since the 1970s, environmentalists
have halted the construction of nuclear power plants in the
The massive power shovels, long-wall miners, conveyor belts
and behemoth trucks used in mining and moving this coal consume many billions of
gallons of fuel every year, and pollute the air. The trains that transport the
coal are heavy and slow-moving, and their locomotives use many more billions of
gallons of fuel per year, also causing air pollution. When this coal is burned
in power plants, hundreds of millions of tons annually of carbon dioxide, sulfur
dioxide, mercury etc. pour into the atmosphere, which environmentalists
insistently lament yet which their own policies have caused.
This energy waste and environmental
degradation is completely unnecessary. All of these coal-burning power plants
can and should be converted to nuclear energy which produces no air pollution,
makes only small amounts of low-level radioactive waste, and which requires
thousands of times less land displacement, energy use and air pollution than
that which is associated with mining and moving 1.2 billion tons of coal every
year.
That 1.2 billion tons of domestic American coal then can be
converted into 2.4 billion barrels of gasoline (2 barrels per ton, according to
the energy industry), providing 60% of our current annual gasoline demand. This
will keep energy dollars here at home and will increase our energy independence
dramatically.
Another advantage: If American railroads were to clear their
tracks of the 200 heavy, slow-moving coal trains that enter their system every
day, the railroads would save billions of gallons of fuel per year, would
operate much more efficiently and thus would be able to move other freight in a
more expeditious manner so as to remove many millions more truck shipments from
our highways every year, saving many more billions of gallons of fuel and
pollution from trucks.
See how environmentalism has caused a chain of events that
squanders our natural resources?
2) Environmentalists have
opposed the burning of garbage to make energy. Garbage is
the single most plentiful, available and useful 'alternative energy' source in
In the town of
See how inefficient this is, thanks to environmentalism?
The important thing about trash-to-electricity, however, is
that we would get a 'second use' out of the garbage we create when burning it to
make electricity. The first use is in the packaging that we need to get our food
to us (like cereal boxes, plastic bags) and the second use is in generating
electricity. This would be an efficient use of resources. And rather than go
through all the bother and expense of recycling newspapers, we could throw them
in the garbage and burn them to make electricity. This is yet another form of
recycling.
Why do environmentalists endlessly
complain about plastic bags and excessive packaging when we could be converting
every single pound of it into energy? Why not make lemonade out of lemons? Not
only can we burn the garbage we are creating today, but we have hundreds of
millions of tons of garbage buried in landfills all over
Can you ever satisfy an
environmentalist? No, you can never, ever
mollify an environmentalist, or any socialist for that matter. They are part of
3) Environmentalists have
restricted energy production all over the
Here is a quote from Sue Miller, an
Do you understand what selfishness this
represents? An environmentalist is going to be disturbed if her view is
obstructed! This is a typical environmentalist... me, me, me. The question is: How many Americans have time to go climb mountains
in
Precious few, dear friends…
And isn’t 99% of
4) Environmentalists themselves
are big energy hogs, people like Sue Miller. Ever notice how many of
them go backpacking in the Rockies, bird-watching in Ecuador, ice climbing in
Alaska, or wildlife spotting in Africa, or they drive 50 or 100 or 200 miles on a
weekend to their favorite river to go kayaking, or to their favorite mountain to
go hiking? They certainly burn up a lot of energy traveling to places that
they want to go. But if you want gasoline just to get to work every
day, they say “tough luck”. Because they are going to block energy production
which pushes up prices.
Ever notice how many of the ‘global warming’ alarmists in the
universities, in the government and in enviro organizations spend the year flying
around the globe commiserating with other alarmists attending conferences,
retreats and lectures? This is unnecessary of course. All of this information
could be effectively transmitted via the internet.
Ever notice how many of today’s enviro scientists, biologists,
zoologists and other worrywarts travel far and wide to study every little
species? Yet 99% of their research means nothing and will be forgotten by time
anyway. Who reads all those reports these people write? (Answer: Usually nobody. Or they
read them to each other.)
When you add up all environmentalists’ own use, it is
a large amount of energy and pollution. And this comes from people who
repeatedly tell us that A) the world is running out of energy B) so-called
‘global warming’ is killing the planet C) pollution is threatening mankind.
So why don’t they themselves use less energy instead of
wasting earth’s allegedly scarce resources themselves? Why can’t they live by
example? It would be very effective if they did.
Answer: Because liberals never live by example. They only
wish to make rules for the rest of us.
5) Environmentalists and their
friends in Big Government have been advocating for decades the construction of
energy-wasting mass-transit projects. While 75% of Americans drove to
work alone in 2000, public transit carried only 3.4% in
And that small number of people moving by mass transit often
does not even make mass transit energy efficient. If a person burns a gallon of
gas getting to and from work in his/her car, that is a gallon of gasoline burned
for a purpose. But if a heavy gas-guzzling bus or train runs empty or with few
passengers – as many very expensive mass transit systems do – they are actually
wasting fuel and causing unnecessary pollution, and are not even as efficient as
a car.
Yet you never see environmentalists targeting these
mass-transit systems because these systems are funded by the government which
also funds many environmentalists through direct monetary grants, through public
and private university funding, and through research grants at enviro groups
dispersed through government agencies.
Cross-country Amtrak routes also could be eliminated if
enviros and their liberal friends did not object. These trains
use large amounts of fuel for very few passengers and require a government
subsidy of more than $50 per ticket. These long-haul Amtrak trains also run on
the tracks of private-sector freight railroads. To make accommodations for these
Amtrak trains, the freight trains lose some efficiency. If they did not lose
that efficiency, they could move more freight.
6) Environmentalists still are
advocating the silly idea of the electric car. This is another leftist
fantasy designed to do two things: To fool us into thinking that we are missing
out on some earth-saving idea; and to again blame corporate
But the electric car never has been commercialized because it
simply wastes too much energy. Because everyone knows that electricity is
expensive. And if you use electricity to power cars that have to carry driver,
children, luggage, passengers, tools etc., then you are wasting electricity,
which is a highly refined resource that we need for better purposes like running
computers, light bulbs and electric motors in the home.
7) By law, environmentalists have
legislated construction of power plants that burn natural gas as a 'clean' fuel.
But natural gas is a highly-refined resource that should not be burned in huge
quantities in power plants, but instead should be used for home cooking and
heating, industrial heating and baking, and other processes that require a clean
energy source that can be easily modulated.
All the pipelines built to transport the gas to the power
plants have consumed large amounts of energy in manufacture and installation;
while the transport of gas through the pipelines requires much energy as well. All
unnecessary.
And through supply and demand, burning large amounts of gas in power plants pushes up the
price of natural gas for other people who need it like homeowners, industry and
small businesses.
All because of liberal environmentalists.
8) Leftist environmentalists
have urged the public to install solar panels on their roofs for hot-water
heating in the home. But these systems are far too expensive, are very
inefficient (they only survive when the government subsidizes them) and they
actually cause your electricity consumption to increase. This was
proven when Al Gore hurriedly installed solar panels and other so-called
energy-saving devices at his
Why would electricity consumption increase with these solar panels?
Because these systems work on the following principle:
Your hot water tank is typically located in your basement. The
water is heated by electricity, oil or natural gas and then is circulated
through your house to the bathroom, kitchen etc.
With a solar system, you install a whole separate system (very
wasteful and expensive) to heat hot water with the sun. You install solar panels
on the roof of your house which you connect to a pipe that runs to the basement
and then back to the roof. You connect an electric pump to that pipe to pump a
fluid like ethylene glycol (anti-freeze) from the basement, through the pipe, up
to the roof. The fluid then trickles down the solar panel, picking up the sun’s
heat. It then is collected at the bottom of the solar panel and returns to the
basement as hot fluid in the pipe. The pipe then bends into a coil configuration
that is immersed in your water tank. The hot ethylene glycol inside the pipe
then transfers its heat to the water in the tank which is then pumped out to
your house as needed.
Only problem is that you have to pump the ethylene glycol from
the basement to the roof all day long. If you pump 100 gallons a day, that is
the equivalent of about 800 pounds. That is a lot of weight to pump up to your
roof day after day after day. Try pumping it by hand and you wouldn’t last long.
The electricity needed to do all that pumping adds up and pushes up your
electric bill substantially. This probably is why Gore’s electricity bill went
up, because he lives in a big mansion with a roof high above the second floor.
9) Enviros have been urging the
Wind energy also is very inefficient in
that the wind does not blow all the time. In Spring 2008 the state of
So if the wind only blows, say, half the
time, you would need to install 2,000 windmills at 1 megawatt each just to get
1,000 megawatts of power. This means double the commitment of energy, land and
resources (wind generators, steel towers, transmission lines etc.) just to
manufacture, erect and connect all the extra windmills and to clear the land to
accommodate them.
Bad idea. Real environmentalists oppose wind power.
10) Environmentalists frequently oppose new
technologies that are cleaner and produce less pollution. The American
economy today is twice as efficient energy-wise at it was 50 years ago. It
produces twice as much wealth per unit of energy input as it did in 1958. This is
due not to pressure from environmentalists and their endless laws, but because capitalist
technology naturally is always moving toward more efficient production.
In fact enviros frequently try to block new
technologies like nuclear power. And they do so in many other ways. In
So it is plain to see that if we could just overcome
the obstruction tactics of left-wing ecologists, and avoid their inefficient ideas,
that we could have a much cleaner environment that uses less energy.
Someday when Americans see the truth, we will have a cleaner
and more productive economy.
The Debacle of
On August 15-18, 2009 we mark the 40th anniversary of the
We could have seen it coming. As the Summer of Love swept the nation in 1967,
with thousands of youths migrating to the
Who wants to work when you can lay around having sex and taking drugs in
Newsreels of The Haight were telling. Dangerous overdoses abounded, young people
arrived penniless and ended up sleeping in the streets, and a stoned-out
pleasure-seeking, concert-going apathy stole the souls of all. LSD, an agent of
pure ruin, was easily available. ‘Free’ food banks showed how the ‘caring’ leftists in
But nothing is free. To rational people, that is. It all ended up being costly
in the long run. Very costly.
By 1969,
As the
There wasn’t.
Millions, friends. Millions. They may be your next-door neighbor living in a personal prison.
The
Over the next three days, the situation descended into filth, thirst, hunger,
stupidity, mud, chaos, sickness, heat, bad drugs and awful music, all combining to create
an exemplary event of the times.
And who flew in to save the day with emergency food, water and medical supplies?
The
A
But in fact, it was not all their fault. The entire 'hippie' movement was being
controlled from the outside via mob-think. Most of the 'hippies' came from prosperous, decent
middle-class backgrounds. And the anti-war movement and then the
‘hippies’ themselves came to be manipulated and even funded by national and
international left-wing groups, and by the Soviet Union. After all, if you wish
to destroy a nation without firing a shot, you go after its youth and you poison
them about their own history, and give them everything they want – drugs,
pleasure, sloth – which young people are only too glad to accept. Then
you tell them how smart and original they are, when in fact they are cowards and
dupes who are being turned against not only their nation and their elders, but
against themselves. This is classic socialism and is the way that all leftist
entities pit people against each other and against themselves for political
gain.
As recession now wracks America and we all look back on our comfortable lives
during which many people always seemed to want more, some young people today are
carrying on in the tradition of the 1960s, promoting radical socialism and
partaking of a decadent pleasure culture.
But most are much more serious. When asked about
Today, most young people are more concerned about their own economic futures
than they are about some dopey concert 40 years ago. To them,
Interestingly, if you look at many of the rich people in
The great myth of the 1960s and its
Yes, millions of youth did partake of the 1960s lifestyle,
but many, many millions more did not. And if you consider the