‘Clean’, like ‘smart’, has become the prerequisite for all technology. Both are myths.
Smart technology is surveillance technology. It is not smarter because of its inherent qualities, but because it sends and receives data that allows it to be ‘smarter’ in manipulating users. The smart part of smart technology comes from human beings. So does the stupid part when people sacrifice their privacy and independence for the benefits of technology being shaped to them.
Clean energy is even more of a myth. The Inflation Increase Act doles out another stream of billions toward the inefficient forms of energy generation that the government has been subsidizing for over 50 years because some Madison Avenue ad agency branded them ‘clean’.
Energy is inherently clean and dirty. Making the inherent forces of the universe useful requires mining metal, cutting down trees, and turning fossil fuels into plastic to assemble machines. Once those machines are running, they will shed heat because ‘clean’ or ‘dirty’, that is how the second law of thermodynamics works. Not even Al Gore can evade entropy and not even the shiniest solar panel, sleekest wind turbines or smoothly humming Tesla will prevent energy from being wasted as it is transferred, stored or used to do one thing or another locally or nationally.
The only truly energy efficient energy comes from bioluminescent creatures like fireflies. We didn’t make them and despite all the boasts from technocrats, we can’t duplicate them.
Clean energy depends on massive rare earth mines run by Communist China that poison everything around them. Wind turbines require huge amounts of balsa wood that are deforesting the Amazon. Neither turbines nor solar panels are recycled when they go bad. They end up in landfills and become toxic waste. Breathing in fiberglass from severed wind turbines or drinking water tainted with heavy metals from solar panels is a serious health hazard.
Much of the clean garbage that we call ‘recycling’ also ends up in landfills. The difference between dirty garbage and clean garbage is that we send some of the clean garbage off to China or third world countries where it’s recycled under primitive conditions and then shipped back to us. That is until China cracked down on the toxic hazards of the recycling industry and began refusing much of our clean garbage which now goes into equally clean landfills.
There was nothing environmentally sound about sending pizza boxes or coke bottles halfway around the world. An article described a Chinese city where plastic was recycled as a “dead zone” with “nothing green” where “sheets of corrugated plastic boxes, old plastic barrels, and giant dried puddles of plastic” are shredded, “poured into metal tubs full of caustic cleaning fluid” and then the “excess trash and cleaning fluid” is “tossed into a waste pit on the edge of town.”
That’s the dirty reality behind the recycling triangle and the ads filled with cartoon disposable goods eager to be recycled into new products at the behest of willing children.
The clean part of clean energy or garbage is not in how it’s made, but in how we perceive it.
A solar panel seems aesthetically cleaner than a coal plant. An electric car emits an artificial spaceship hum as it glides down the street. A wind turbine gleams white. Such trivial surface impressions that mistake architecture for the process maintain a trillion dollar scam.
Solar and wind energy systems are presented as more natural than any other kind of energy because the association with the sun and the wind somehow insulates them from the dirty realities of thermodynamics. The design and the branding of solar panels and wind turbines inculcate the myth that they are clean interfaces for receiving this magical bounty for the sky.
The 1960s neo-romanticism rejected the industrial revolution. When the flower children grew up into bourgeois suburbanites, holding down jobs at ad agencies and nonprofits, they wanted a technology that would maintain the same illusion of philosophical consistency. Instead of following through with their principles, they rebranded the industrial revolution to make it much more expensive, less efficient and inaccessible to the dirty working class. The new technology, like their suburban lives, would be morally and aesthetically clean. Like garbage recycled in China and returned in a gleaming bottle of purified tap water, it would make dirty clean again.
Idealists believe that life is black and white, dirty or clean, and that the two can be absolutely separated. The universe does not fall into such neat categories. Nevertheless the Left has spent two centuries tearing apart society in search of a clean utopia. Dirt, coal miners, factories and men who work for a living reek of oppression. When class warfare gave way to green neo-romanticism, the working class was abandoned for a clean post-industrial computerized future. The dirty jobs were outsourced to China while the working class was left with the Rust Belt and meth. America was going to be a clean nation where everyone sat around an Apple laptop before getting into their electric cars and going off for a hike. No smoking allowed.
But what is clean anyway? The old Left used to deplore conflating physical and moral cleanliness only for the new Left to fall into that error anyway. The new master class tells coal miners to learn to code or install solar panels. Like the old elites, its true objection is that they’re dirty. The nonsensical tenets of environmentalism are the aesthetic fetishes of the upper class. They represent a cultural sensibility, not a scientific one. Its vocabulary reeks of escapism from the realities of life, smart technology, clean energy, and information stored in the ‘cloud’.
Technology isn’t magic. The only smarts are human, the only energy is dirty and the cloud is a bunch of servers owned by a global corporation that are powered by coal plants where the constant noise is so loud that employees can suffer hearing damage.
The myth of clean is powered by an escape from reality. That escapism has a high price, not only in the billions wasted and lives ruined by environmentalist gimmicks, but the entire bloody history of the Left which is one long escape from reality into the tyranny of philosopher-kings.
The Left’s energy and its garbage are no cleaner than its ideology and its history. And it is those who are dirtiest on the inside who feel the greatest pathological need to be clean on the outside.
Running our economy on unicorn farts is not a sound idea.
It is for those who have the monopoly on unicorn fart offsets, e.g. Al Gore and some members of the Kerry and Biden families and administration
Beautiful reply!!! Brilliant.
AL Gore has some serious assets; something easily acquired when a cheap movie is required viewing/purchase. Rumor has it that he’s tapped a financial mother load (minus what was spent to pay off Tipper).
Rigoburta Menchu cashed in also.
Though exposed as a fraud, she still got a constant revenue stream from her books – books that were required purchase in many college courses.
She needed that money, since she blew a sizable portion of her Nobel money to pay blackmail to those who knew her true story in Guatemala.
Her tough shit that word got out anyway. (Perhaps if she’d written more checks.)
I hope it wasn’t lost on too many idiots in CA when they were told not to plug in their EVs.
If deductive logic prevails (doubtful), they’ll do the math on what happens when the bankrupt state has nothing BUT overpriced EVs.
Prager U has some exceptional five minute videos that buttress your fine article, and, as a bonus, they’re not required purchase from any college.
Times like this, I wish we could upvote. Hope that’s coming soon.
Your wish has been granted!
Magical thought, irrational thought, linked to the new narcissistic religion of climatology, affirming, in an anthropocentrism, that human activity is more powerful than cosmic and terrestrial activity and that human beings have the ability to control climate, meteorology. A pure obscurantism of modern times.
“The 1960s neo-romanticism rejected the industrial revolution”<
See also the "neo-Luddist" movement,
indeed, except that unlike the original luddites, the neo-luddites weren’t workers, just privileged leftists who could afford the comfort of non-industrial lifestyles
And they’ll drone on about the hubris of others. They take the gold in arrogant beliefs and blind faith.
They take the gold alright. They are a crime syndicate that wants everything for themselves. Leftism is the ultimate in ideological greed.
And to think, if only alchemy had worked we wouldn’t have the left.
Possibly the best closing line that I’ve ever read.
Rational attention to the ills of the green plague is increasing, slowly. Thank you for your astute and well reasoned perspective.
I agree. Daniel’s essays are always great reads, but this one was another ascent into a kind of poetry.
that’s high praise, thank you
I was looking to post a similar comment but here it is, nice work Mr. Greenfield. Outstanding article with and excellent argument!
Devastating, true analysis delivered with muscular, powerful words. Thank you, Daniel Greenfield.
thank you for reading and commenting once again
also nice dog
It’s religion versus America, it’s mysticism versus America, it’s magical thinking versus America, it’s unreason versus America, it’s sacrifice versus America, it’s altruism versus America, pick one or the other, you can’t have both.
The historical and unprecedented virtues of America were derived from reason, the catastrophic flaws of America are derived from unreason.
“America was created by men who broke with all political traditions and who originated a system unprecedented in history, relying on nothing but the “unaided” power of their own intellect.” – Ayn Rand
“We must smother the internal and external enemies of the Republic or perish, in this situation, the first maxim of your policy ought to be to lead the people by reason and the people’s enemies by terror.”
Robespierre, On Political Morality
It’s THX vs. the rest of us. Pick one. You can’t have both.
I guess that is why so many of the founders were reasonable Christians. I guess that is why this country has always been a predominantly Christian nation. I guess that is why it will never be run by losers like you.
Thanks Daniel, great article on a great topic!!!
Some decades ago a great spiritual teacher in India said something like there is nothing completely clean in this world. I think about that probably daily, yet this is the very first article I’ve seen in all those years that addresses the topic.
Completely clean for whom and for what? Cleanliness is a value but values are contextual. The universe itself, as such, is neither clean or dirty, it simply is. It is only to a living organism that the concept of “clean” can apply. To a living organism, like man, that faces the alternative of life or death as an inherent condition of his existence, sufficient, contextual, cleanliness is complete cleanliness.
Indeed it is now known that children raised in too clean an environment do not develop healthy immune systems and their immune systems begin to attack their own bodies this is the case with such immune disorders as Crohn’s disease. I remember reading that temporary (about 6 months to a year) relief from intestinal auto-immune disease was achieved by medically ingesting dead intestinal parasites in a doctor prescribed medicinal cocktail.
The Dung beetle lives in dung but the dung is not “unclean dirt” to him, it is it’s nourishment and sustenance.
“Value” is that which one acts to gain and keep, “virtue” is the action by which one gains and keeps it. “Value” presupposes an answer to the question: of value to whom and for what? “Value” presupposes a standard, a purpose and the necessity of action in the face of an alternative. Where there are no alternatives, no values are possible.” – Ayn Rand
Clean is an abstraction and extreme abstractions don’t exist in the real world. The Left however loves abstractions. So do various fanatics.
It’s quite possible the people with solar panels on their roofs will one day be unable to sell their homes because of the toxic materials that go into these panels.
It’s not just the panels that are not cleanly made or even clean, Flat screen devices of all kinds produce Nitrogen Trifluoride gas during their manufacture which has a much worse (MUCH worse) greenhouse effect than CO2 could ever hope to have. How many millions of all these devices from solar panels to TVs to laptops to tablets to smart phones are manufactured every year? And how many politicians even know this? Or even care?
They’ve also spent a lot of money and without subsidies, which are starting to go away in California, the whole thing becomes uneconomical.
Also, on a trivial personal tangent, installing those things on the roof can cause roof leaks, which tormented me for decades.
Great article! Thank you! I just wished those who promote the lie of a ‘Climate Crisis’ would open their eyes and see how ludicrous all of this is! But then again when one is power hungry then will do anything to control the masses!!
and there’s lots of money to be made
Rain Fuels are the future, the greenies will love them, and the UK is poised to lead the way.
Rain Fuels sound really green, sustainable (for our weather, not California but who cares), earth friendly, environmentally sensitive, Gaia compliant, spiritually uplifting, rain forest protecting, whale and seal loving, elephant and tiger preserving.
But it’s another name for hydrogen, watch this space.
as long as it’s not that lethal Dihydrogen Monoxide which kills tens of thousands of people every year
1: I love the way I can panic people with the H2O story.
2: Only at the end of the article did I see you were the author although I should have been able to recognize your telltale sign of genius and fact based sarcasm!
it’s easy to be sarcastic when society has become a collection of humorless leftist platitudes
A compelling essay. I have to think of a documentary, Manufactured Landscapes, that came out in 2006, which portrays the effects of industrializing China on a mass scale. One horrific scene shows what happens when your computer or TV is “recycled.”
a shame people don’t pay attention to what recycling looks like in the real world
I’m wondering what solutions you might suggest? For both the problems associated with recycling, as well as how we make electricity. Maybe also you have a solution for the problems of greed, manipulation, selfishness, and abuse of power?
I’d like to know how you are part of the solution. All I’m reading is a bunch of complaining, finger pointing, blaming, and name calling.
Great article layed out very nicely! Thanks.
thank you, John
These are same types who have infected the business world with PowerPoint slides. Their idea of a good business plan is a slide with a vertical arrow, the number 200%, and an emoji of a smiley face. Ask them what their specific business plan actually is and they will regurgitate platitudes- it means right-sized, human-centric and mission oriented with nuanced approaches to address a dynamic and ever changing industry. Eventually the employees stop asking questions because management turns over every 6 months with a new set of slides and ideologues at the helm.
Wait, we have to consult the shareholders and embrace a sustainable but dynamic infrastructure while right-sizing all departments
Dear God, I’m not sure how many more iterations of the same BS with a different name that I can take: Lean Manufacturing, Six Sigma, Just in Time Manufacturing, now Product Supply System. Pretty sure there’s at least one or two more in my 20 years that were left out.
All of it the same attempt to eliminate inventory carrying costs throughout the procurement, manufacturing, packaging and distribution process. Always resulting in scheduling snafus, delays, last second changes, release expedites and missed schedules.
Seriously, the last email we got talking about the newest (recycled) initiative included the line “…this time we will succeed…”. My coworkers must have thought I was insane, as I started cackling uncontrollably.
All the leftist talking heads concerned about CO2 should try to fathom a world without it.. we’d be f**cked. Its funny when you do a search most of the responses paint a pretty picture about how the earths temperature would be lower but they completely miss the point. No CO2, no plants, no Phytoplankton and no humans. smh
Not one for nuance and understanding complex systems are you. H2O is essential for life as well but too much is also deadly. As with everything the dose makes the poison some things like botulism toxin you only need 0.000000001 g/kg to kill you. The current life on earth requires a pretty narrow set of conditions to thrive on the planet. So we are drastically dumping roughly 40 billion metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere annually. So the heat energy that the earth is receiving from the sun warming the planet well that energy then dissipates off the earth and into space. Our atmosphere helps to maintain us in a sweet spot temperature wise which is why compared with the planets without atmospheres we don’t experience huge temperature fluctuations. But the massive amount of CO2 that we have been dumping in the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels since the industrial revolution is causing more energy to be reflected back to earth than what should be going back into space. We are now at a point were all long lasting ice on earth is going to melt which will drastically effect the oceans and costal areas. Normally high heat areas which were barely suitable to human life will be uninhabitable. Triggering mass migrations to areas that are more habitable. Most of the United States is going to be in those more habitable areas meaning more migration is coming. Ocean life is going to be effected greatly as they require a pretty narrow range of conditions to survive as anyone who has kept a salt water aquarium will attest too. But hey for this incredibly brief moment we created this enormous amount of wealth which
is just a massive shared delusion. As far as energy goes nuclear is the cleanest bang for the buck that we should be massively investing in as well as eliminating the monopoly made and legally codified for energy producers a century ago in this country. Then we can address this other elephant in the room https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-delusion-of-infinite-economic-growth/
Strictly no study demonstrates by A+B that the CO2 of human activity would be responsible for global warming.
There has already been in the history of the planet CO2 levels 10 times higher, this has in no way prevented life from continuing, it has in no way prevented periods of glaciation, cooling.
What generated increases and decreases of CO2 in the atmosphere was caused by natural phenomena, terrestrial and cosmic, these phenomena still exist today, did not stop with the industrial revolution.
Strictly no study demonstrates pae A+B that an increase in CO2 would be a disaster.
Strictly no study demonstrates by A+B that global warming would be a disaster.
All this is scientifically absolutely unfounded.
The cosmic activity and the terrestrial activity having direct impacts on the meteorological changes and on the cycles (which have always existed) are billions, billions, billions of times more powerful than the human activity on this earth.
Humanity has already been confronted with climate change, and has always adapted.
— Edwin X Berry. Human CO2 Emissions Have Little Effect on Atmospheric CO2. International Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences. Vol. 3, No. 1, 2019, pp. 13-26. doi: 10.11648/j.ijaos.20190301.13
— Hermann Harde. What Humans Contribute to Atmospheric CO2 : Comparison of Carbon Cycle Models with Observations. Earth Sciences. Vol. 8, No. 3, 2019, pp. 139-159. doi: 10.11648/j.earth.20190803.13
CO2 is well established as a greenhouse gas, the Theory of Greenhouse Gases establishes this well that CO2 causes an increase in temperature.
Greenhouse effect Joseph Fourier was the first scientist argued for the greenhouse effect in 1824 [ Archer and Pierrehumbert, 2011 ]. The earth receives energy from the sun and re-radiates to outer space. Calculations based on the planetary energy balance indicate that the temperature of the earth is much lower than 0°C as opposed to the observation of 14°C. This discrepancy is believed to be produced by the atmosphere, which traps more long-wave radiation from earth surface and keeps the earth warmer. A mechanism named greenhouse effect is proposed to describe this process.
Greenhouse gases An Irish scientist Tyndall in 1849 verified through his designed experiments that CO2 has greenhouse effect on earth’s climate [ Tyndall , 1861 ]. He was the first to correctly measure the relative infrared absorptive powers of the gases including nitrogen, oxygen, CO2 , water vapor, methane, ozone, etc. These experiments proved that CO2 , methane, nitrous oxide and water vapor have strong absorption on infrared radiation. These gases are named greenhouse gases owing to their greenhouse effect.
Effects of double CO2 concentration on climate Swedish scientist Arrhenius in 1896 was the first to argue that the earth would become warming due to increased emissions of CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels and other combustion processes [ Arrhenius , 1896 ]. He estimated the global average temperature to rise about 8°F (or 4.5°C) in the scenario of double CO2 concentration in atmosphere. It is usually called equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) and very close to the upper limits in the subsequent IPCC Assessment Reports, although this estimation was calculated only with a simple one-layer model at that time.
Atmospheric CO2 concentration rising In 1957, American scientist Keeling set up a station at Mauna Loa the first time to directly observe the CO2 concentration in atmosphere [ Keeling , 1960 ]. The measurements demonstrate atmospheric CO2 concentration continues to increase, which is accorded with the temperature rising in instrumental records. This consistence is believed as strong evidence in favor of attribution of global warming to greenhouse effect. Additionally, the records of CO2 in Antarctic also have similar results.
Yes there is evidence that CO2 levels were high 150 million years ago and 600 million years ago at a time when life on this planet was very different. They also were not sudden changes it occurred gradually allowing for adaptation to occur.
Strictly no study demonstrates, prove, by A+B that the CO2 of human activity would be responsible for global warming.
The main greenhouse gas is water vapor. CO2 is 0.04% in the atmosphere, it was 0.03% a century ago.
These are all scientifically unfounded claims.
There are a whole bunch of other factors that come into play in global warming, and each of these factors is not fully known today, so no one can say today that the one and only responsible for a global warming is CO2.
The causes of coolings and warmings, come from a whole set of very complex processes with a very high percentage of unknown.
However, it is not difficult to understand.
Thank you Mr Greenfield for cementing into words feelings that many thinking people have but have difficulty expressing.
I would be very interested to hear/read your macro view of how the WEF plan for the future of society will be executed now that it has been designed and openly declared. As comical as Schwab appears to be he is anything but that. It is a masterful ploy of manipulation to have the message delivered by an easy to dismiss even comical messenger to lull its recipients into blissful ignorance of what is happening right now, globally.
And if possible perhaps to write about how you see the ‘invisible hands’ moving the pieces on the global chessboard.
With sincere thanks and best wishes.
Micheal Moore, of all people, made a rather interesting film called The Human Planet, find it on You Tube, where he points out the inanity of wind farms, killing birds and falling apart, and let us all remember where those huge fans are made as well as all the batteries needed, heres another clue for you all …It aint in America…
Your article is concise and spot on. The “Cleanies” resemble the Cathars of medieval fame who were inspirational to some of the Nazi architects.
Interesting perspective. Two things: Products of all types need to be significantly more efficient on all levels – the features of disruptive materials replacing inefficient pumps, motors, etc. AND look how each generation I’m a semiconductor, or a software program such as word have advanced. My point is Version One of anything of value in this area clearly will not be the last version. A suggestion: see how to integrate and prosper – kind of an updated Margaret Mead comment.
I have a pet peeve about “clean eating.” I was not eating dirt and I wash my dishes so I don’t like being told to follow a “clean diet,” whatever that means.
Chances are it means virtue signaling with food.
& Thanks for a great article. It’s so important to understand the psychology, however bizarre, behind these cultural assumptions as they may just be ruin the world.
We may need to invent entirely new accolades for this brilliant piece. Brilliant insight that cuts like a laser.
The left lies every way it can, and always by metaphor. They always need a filter, a disguise, a distraction, or distancing to fool the rubes. “Clean” is a great metaphor for a perfect world, but nothing is truly clean by the left’s own definition. They contaminate everything with their “clean” lies.
A perfectly clean world wouldn’t have disease, so perfect scientists make perfect vaccines and everyone must get vaccinated. ,If the vaccine kills some people, those deaths are necessary and beneficial if we want a clean human race. Isn’t clean wonderful?
The first rule of utopia is total compliance. And therapeutics that work on particular diseases aren’t perfect solutions because some work for some people and not for others. Utopia has to have perfect and uniform solutions that warrant forced compliance. If some people get sicker or die it was their failure, never the cleaning solution.. And above all, reality must constantly be cleansed of truth. Truth includes too many dirty details.