Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket. – Eric Hoffer, The Temper of Our Time (1967)
The annual Earth Day will occur on April 22. Earth Day Network, the nonprofit that manages the event, has selected this as their theme: “OUR POWER, OUR PLANET, inviting everyone around the globe to unite behind renewable energy. . . .”
In the spring of 1970, the editors of Ramparts, a now-defunct New Left publication, predicted that the inaugural Earth Day would become “the first step in a con game that will do little more than abuse the environment even further.”
Earth Day Network has fulfilled the prophecy.
The photo of mountains posted above is used by multiple Bureau of Land Management websites to promote BLM’s programs for filling up public lands with so-called “renewable energy.” The picture accurately shows weather-dependent power systems must chew up far too much of what is decidedly not renewable: Earth’s landscapes.
Alternatively, a typical natural gas power plant needs just 0.2 acres to operate. That’s roughly the land needed for a modest suburban homesite, and it doesn’t need to sit in front of windy—and otherwise pretty—mountains. To get equivalent power from wind turbines requires 370 times as much land use, with—as shown in the photo—turbines towering 300 feet into the sky.
Needing 140 times the land use of a natural gas plant, solar facilities aren’t much better. Google up “Taihang mountains solar panels” to see multiple images of previously beautiful green hills in China now totally covered in black panels.
The material progress of our species is directly tied to increasing our energy density. Using much less of the Earth to get a whole lot more power from it is how we advance. Humans nearly hunted whales to extinction so we could obtain tiny trickles of oil from them, and we once deforested vast hunks of wilderness just to create fire.
Switching to land-devouring wind and solar energy would be a giant leap backward.
Nuclear power, America’s largest source of carbon-free electricity, is a functionally miraculous alternative. To get the energy embedded in 17,000 cubic feet of natural gas or 120 gallons of oil requires a uranium pellet no larger than the end of a small adult’s thumb. A nuclear power plant is almost as gentle on land use as a natural gas power station, but is the most reliable source of power we have and one of the safest.
But don’t attend Earth Day to hear this good news because the Earth Day Network hates nuclear power. In 2021 the nonprofit co-signed a letter sent to President Biden that made this request: “Phase out nuclear energy as an inherently dirty, dangerous and costly energy source.”
Last year’s Earth Day theme— “Planet vs Plastics”— also portrayed environmental progress as a problem. The Earth Day Network’s website for the event proclaimed they were “unwavering in our commitment to end plastics for the sake of human and planetary health.”
Trees, turtles, and elephants are just the start of a long list of creatures and resources that were once consumed with reckless abandon but are now conserved because we use plastic instead. Innumerable plastic health and safety devices save and prolong human lives every day. We waste less food, and pay less for it, because low-cost plastic keeps it fresh. Most household consumer products, from toothbrushes to televisions, are made with plastic.
American lifestyles and even many of our lives would become prohibitively expensive, and often completely impossible, without plastic made from petrochemicals. Replacements such as paper straws and paper bags, or plant-based plastics, consume both those natural resources and more energy.
Michael Shellenberger, founder and president of Environmental Progress and one of Time magazine’s “heroes of the environment,” has aptly noted that the best way for us to preserve our natural world is to use artificial plastic replacements.
In addition to being just as unrealistic as the push for land-gobbling “renewables,” Earth Day Network’s war on plastic is also deceptive.
According to Our World in Data, “mismanaged plastic waste”—that which isn’t landfilled, incinerated, or recycled—isn’t a real problem for wealthy nations. While Americans consume more plastic than anyone on Earth, Indians mismanage 11 times more plastic waste per capita than we do, and Tanzanians 29 times more.
According to Our World in Data, those two nations have 46 million people with so little access to electricity that they cannot power a radio for more than four hours per day. Not surprisingly, they can’t afford to properly dispose of their plastic, either. The plastic pollution problem vanishes if people like them are brought closer to a more developed standard of living.
Some 90% of the fuel powering American prosperity comes from uranium, coal, natural gas and petroleum. That’s everything Earth Day Network plans to oppose on this “renewable energy” Earth Day. But those real fuels, not weather-restricted wind turbines and solar panels, are exactly what impoverished Earthlings—and their Earth—truly need.
This article first appeared in RealClearEnergy on April 18, 2025.
