​Usually, when we think of the most fundamental things – here, democracy, capitalism, culture and even civilization itself – we assume they are mostly fixed and unchanging, except maybe for the better.
That allows us to make choices about consumption, investing, marriage, children, planning for the future, and other activities reasonably, not by guessing.
The extraordinary events this last year have called these assumptions into question.
Consider our form of government.  By “democracy,” we mean republicanism: most importantly the rule of law; choice of key government authorities via election; constitutionally limited government; individual rights and liberty; etc.  Current riots, looting, arson, theft, assault and even murder by Antifa, Black Lives Matter and their allies threaten our form of government, as well as the capitalist economy, to the point they put civilization itself at risk.
This threat is so great it tends to obscure the extreme differences offered by this year’s state and national elections – the greatest in 160 years.  These radical differences have been developing over half a century in government, economics and education.  So, they should be less surprising than they are.  But they have emerged and come to a head so fast that they shock us.
And what happens if the results of the coming elections so displease the anarchists, nihilists and their ilk that they fly into a cosmic rage seeking to incinerate all of us?
The slow growth and resulting damage to our economy and human wellbeing, however, has been developing the last 30 years and became manifest over the last decade.  Very slow long-term growth and its consequences, while devastating in many ways, is something we’ve been trying to adjust to as the new normal since the Great Recession.
The economic damage from the Covid-19 pandemic and the resulting shutdowns of so much activity and life are another matter, with unknowable and likely devastating consequences, perhaps even in the long run.  Such an overwhelming one-time shock is unknown in our experience but for two world wars in the last century.
The economic and cultural damage and social disorientation from even those two wars was slower to develop and less uniformly destructive to our economy than the shutdowns.  Likewise, the pandemic of a century ago was less damaging and disorienting because state and local governments did not hugely over-react to it the way they have this one.
Economically, we’re well into uncharted waters.  Mapmakers of old often labeled such areas with warnings such as: “Here there be monsters.”  Our present circumstances have that feel.
While the economic prospects are a giant threatening void, the cultural outlook allows for some hope and optimism.  Yes, this year’s symphony, opera and dance seasons are cancelled, but major league, college and high school sports are trying to cobble together something.
On the other hand, beloved restaurants continue to fail in droves.  Candy dances, sidewalk and park fairs, and rodeo too.  But we can also take small comfort as many baseball fans long have in the words, “Wait ‘til next year.”
The cataclysm has not done as much damage nor interrupted literary and intellectual matters, and even the enjoyment of music and art at home, in good part because technology contributes to their continuity and access.  On the other hand, many folks no longer look primarily to religion for much hope.
So all this is scary and disorienting, even as the Pollyanna’s of the world occasionally lob water balloons of hope and optimism.  We also console ourselves with the notion that it can’t stay this bad or continue in negative directions forever.  Right?
Well, we hope right.  But the current political, economic and cultural damage were each unimaginable a year ago --- let alone all three in concert.  Moreover, history shows that continuous progress in them was lacking for thousands of years before it began 250 years ago.
Economic growth was long essentially nil.  Politically, man exploited man as a rule, not an exception.  Culture was usually as poor as economics and politics.
When civilization’s lights went out with the fall of Rome’s empire, the Arthurian Legends arose to give the people some small hope.  I hope the fragility of democracy, capitalism, culture and civilization do not now require a similar comforting myth.
Ron Knecht, MS, JD & PE(CA), has served Nevadans as state controller, a higher education regent, economist, college teacher and legislator.  Contact him at RonKnecht@aol.com. 
Ron Knecht

775-882-2935
775-220-6128
 
www.RonKnecht.net

​A month ago, I wrote the first part of this column, which recounted important parts of the history of commercial nuclear power in America.  Then, I took four weeks off for major, major back surgery.  Now I’m back to suggest what the future of nukes might be if we can learn from the experience of that past.
There are two key lessons of our nuclear power history that should guide our approach to this technology in the future.  First, public health, safety and environmental regulations of this technology and any matter should be governed by a social cost-benefit principle that is more honored in the breach than the observance by our regulation.
Consider the problem of expected radiation leakage from a major pipe in a nuclear plant.  Factors such as thickness of the pipe’s walls, its shape and length, support and restraint systems, the nature and details of its connections and the volumes, temperatures and pressures of water in the pipe will determine the probability and amount of leakage.  Changing those specifications for those factors can change the maximum expectation of leakage at any time or the cumulative leakage over time.
Each such change has costs and benefits.  The cost can be determined by cost engineers and the benefit by other scientists.  When regulators propose a change in any of the factors, the cost-benefit principle requires that they consider the expected costs to the expected benefits.  If the expected benefits exceed the expected costs, then the change should be adopted; otherwise, not.
Unfortunately, that has not been the practice.  Instead, regulators have generally asked whether the proposed increase in safety engineering is technically feasible.  So, in sum, nuclear safety requirements are excessive – and new proposed plants are uneconomic.
The second factor exacerbates this first one.  It takes as much as a decade to design and build one of these wonders.  When an energy company proposes to build one, it presents a conceptual design for regulators to approve.  With that approval, it proceeds, including fleshing out the details as it proceeds.
But at the same time regulators are continuously considering and adopting more regulatory measures.  A big problem arises when regulators seek to apply new standards and information to a part of the plant that has already been built.  The question then becomes whether the builders must retrofit the plant to the new standards.  In the first part of this column, I gave a particularly expensive example.
In short, if regulators remedy these problems by adopting the social cost-benefit principle and being very parsimonious about requiring retrofit, commercial fission power will again become economic.  Then fission can again become an important part of our energy future.
There are two more important aspects that will help make it so.  In 1977, President Jimmy Carter ordered an end reprocessing and recycling spent nuclear fuel.  This involves separating out plutonium and other high-level waste products from the uranium.  The uranium can then be reprocessed and reused.  This approach could provide enough nuclear fuel to satisfy our needs for another century or more.
Right now, the standards that would be applied to reprocessing and recycle are unknown.  However, if we committed to the social cost-benefit principles and few retrofit requirements, the nuclear fuel cycle would become economic.  France is already proving this option in commercial use.
The other question is what type of nuclear plants would we build in the future?  The answer is that other countries and energy firms have continued to develop them.  So, we would have a wide variety of options, up to 2,000 megawatts-electric (MWe).
A very interesting option is the use of small and modular units, as small as 30 MWe.  The modular option would reduce costs via economies of scale and shorten lead times to first operation.  In addition, such units would make a good complement to solar and wind power that is being built.
The opposition to nuclear in general has been and remains ideological and based on ignorance and fear.  I’m not the only former nuclear opponent who has come around over the years as we have learned more from experience and research.  Our good fortune is that a nuclear future is still available.
Ron Knecht, MS, JD & PE(CA), has served Nevadans as state controller, a higher education regent, economist, college teacher and legislator.  Contact him at RonKnecht@aol.com. 
Ron Knecht

775-882-2935
775-220-6128
 
www.RonKnecht.net

In 1977, I completed my masters project in civil engineering at Illinois on power generating economics, emphasizing nuclear power but covering other major technologies too.  It showed that, in general, nukes weren’t then the life-cycle least-cost choice.  Clean coal was.
Ironically, a paper I presented at an American Nuclear Society meeting summarizing the nuclear/coal comparison won an award as the best student paper on power generating economics.  Even though I was already known as a leader of the environmental and consumer opposition to Illinois electric utilities’ proposed nuke plants and rate increases.
I dropped out of grad school because that study led to a job as a Commissioner’s Senior Advisor at the California Energy Commission.  It also fueled a career as an expert witness on utilities, energy, economics, finance and policy.  With power generating economics being my first major area of expertise, I accumulated small partial credit over two decades helping stop a dozen nuclear units proposed around the country.
Today, I tell folks that, if there were an organization named Former Nuclear Opponents for the Resuscitation of the Fission Option, I’d be founder and president.  How’d I get from there to here?
Even though I was politically active in utility and energy matters, I remained a serious objective analyst, essential for an expert witness.  In particular, I studied closely the costs of nuclear plants, which were increasing in the 1970s and 1980s at stunning and sustained rates.  Some other very good analysts were also studying that problem, and often testifying for utilities opposite me.
I proposed the hypothesis that regulation was increasingly requiring mitigation of environmental and public health and safety externalities of the technology.  The costs were being internalized.  In a sense, that was correct.  But it missed two fundamental points.
In 1984, as the principal economist at the California Public Utilities Commission, I toured the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, then nearing completion, as I was preparing my proposals for ratemaking treatment of that plant.  In nearly every corner of the building, I saw a jumble of structural beams and other elements that looked like a mess.
I asked about that, and the engineers explained that the building had originally been designed and built to a 0.35g earthquake lateral acceleration specification.  However, during construction, they learned that a major fault was closer to the plant and shallower than previously thought.  So, federal regulators required them to retrofit the building to 0.85g standards.  Thus, the mess.
Retrofit rang a bell for me.  In 1973, as an assistant engineer at the City of Urbana, the crusty old public works director told me the environmental and other amenities I wanted to see in our neighborhoods were cheap and easy.  I was stunned; he always seemed like Dr. No on those matters.  But he explained that 100-year storm sewers, bikeways, underground utility lines, etc. were easy if they were designed into the subdivision from the start.  The problem with putting them in existing neighborhoods is that retrofit is very difficult and extremely costly.
I also further considered cost internalization processes upon returning to graduate school at Stanford in 1987.  I learned the key principle of regulation is that one should increase mitigation requirements (such as reduced radiation levels) until the benefit from the last increment of mitigation (such as greater reduction of emissions) exactly equals its cost.
Since costs of each increment of control or mitigation rise as more stringent levels are required and the value of benefits fall as mitigation levels approach 100 percent, controls added up to that equality point produce net social benefits.  Beyond that point, the social costs exceed the social benefits of each measure, and thus those measures are socially wasteful.
But American environmental, public health and safety regulation don’t adhere to this fundamental principle.  Instead, requirements are often set to technically achievable levels, regardless of whether they are economic.  This problem is extreme for nukes because they have a long design and construction period – and regulators require retrofit late in the construction process to new standards adopted during construction.
The combination of excessive standards and retrofit convinced me that nukes would be economic (and environmentally beneficial) if we got public policy right.  More next time.
Ron Knecht, MS, JD & PE(CA), has served Nevadans as state controller, a higher education regent, economist, college teacher and legislator.  Contact him at RonKnecht@aol.com. 
Ron Knecht

775-882-2935
775-220-6128
 
www.RonKnecht.net

​Editors note: This article was written by the late Orlis Trone in March, 2009. It is as pertinent today as it was back then, so we are reprinting it.

America’s institutions of learning OUGHT to be the sanctuary of academic freedom, where the principle of “the free flow of ideas” reigns supreme and the mind is esteemed as inviolable. Sadly, however, and to the detriment of America as a free nation, the freethought-killing pestilence of socialist ideology has established absolute power over the nation’s academic delivery system, and has done to it what absolute power does, corrupted public education ABSOLUTELY. The socialist take-over of the schooling of America has altered the objective of the classroom from education to “RE-EDUCATION,” the goal of which is to inculcate in students an allegiance to socialism and a loathing for American culture. Before our eyes, we are witnessing an ideological mind-grab by way of academic indoctrination. Radical professors like Ward Churchill, who despise everything that this country stands for, are indicting America by criminalizing American history, that is, by rewriting it to read like a “rap sheet.” It is through the reeducation of their students that socialist instructors aim to reinvent America as a socialist society. Freedom of speech was the first casualty of socialism on campus. Since its advocates attained dominance there, they have declared academic censorship against all expressions of pro-American opinion. Any student who attempts to defy their directive is subjected to ferocious acts of “in-your-face” intimidation and is hounded into silence under withering assaults of socialist derision. The title of David Horowitz’ book, “One-Party Classroom,”—written specifically to oppose the foregoing state of affairs—captures the picture perfectly. The academic years of life are the anchoring years of thought-formation, when students are gathering and assembling the contents of their learning into values to live by. That is why the mind-masters of socialism see the campus as “made to order” for the implantation of socialist sentiments. The cadre of political activists they indoctrinate on campus, in turn, indoctrinate “the masses.” The masses, that virtually shoulder-lifted Barack Obama up to the pinnacle of political power, serve to warn that the pestilence of socialism has metastasized from the classroom out into every nook and cranny of American society. But be assured that socialist ideologues are not resting on the laurels of their conquest of the campus. Rather, they are now working to stir up “class consciousness” in the mood of the masses, and to parlay that mood into political authority over the life of every American citizen. Every Republican needs to understand that the greater causal agent of our recent defeat was THE MASSES, the progenies of socialist indoctrination. For that reason—and for the survival of our two-party system—we must reinstate the sovereignty of academic freedom so that the principle of “THE FREE FLOW OF IDEAS” will, once again, reign supreme in the classrooms of America—from grammar school to high school to college. 

​The web site of Nevada Humanities (NH), a nonprofit institution that receives substantial public monies and federal tax exemptions, emphasizes its commitment to equity:
“Nevada Humanities is committed to equity and inclusion in everything we do.  Nevada Humanities believes that diversity, equity, empathy, respect, connection, and participation are the building blocks to a just and thriving society.  We are committed to the equitable treatment of all people in every aspect of our organization and its activities, and in our understanding of who participates in – and has access to – the humanities. “
By including equity among diversity, empathy, etc. and referencing participation and access of all people, the statement is clearly political, not academic.  And it favors equal outcomes, not the common definition of equity as fairness of process, opportunity, standards, etc.  That is, in fact, now the case for many social activist groups and legal and academic usages, not just NH.
The Merriam Webster Dictionary defines equity primarily as: “justice according to natural law or right[,] specifically: freedom from bias or favoritism.”  There are two secondary meanings.  First, financial equity related to money, property, risk interest, common stocks, etc.  Second, a system of law that supplements, aids or overrides common and statutory law.
Another definition comes from Microsoft’s Bing: “the quality of being fair and impartial.”  It also has similar and short versions of the common financial and legal traditions.  The financial and legal traditions reflect the primary meaning of justice according to natural law or right and according to freedom from bias or favoritism – that is, fairness..
So, the primary and secondary meanings of the term remain what we thought they were and have been for 700 years.  However, progressives, who increasingly have taken over academe (including law schools), jurisprudence, the nonprofit sector and much public policy, have long engaged for their own special-interest purposes in concerted broad efforts to shift the meaning of the term and others ultimately to their opposites.
That’s rhetorical abuse, including terms like “social justice”, “sustainability” and even “the public interest” in the mouths of progressives.
In the legal realm, Robert Longley, with over 30 years in municipal government and urban planning, argues:
“Equality refers to scenarios in which all segments of society have the same levels of opportunity and support.  Equity extends the concept of equality to include providing varying levels of support based on individual need or ability.”


This statement shows expressly the propensity of progressives and other leftists to conceive of society, governance and law in terms of identity groups – “segments of society” – plus human activity and transactions as being between such identity groups, not individuals or firms.  In short, it’s purely political.
It also focuses on activity, relations and transactions as generally mediated or conducted by government, with the assumption that government should control production, distribution, consumption and nearly everything else.  It expressly hints at the Marxist principle of from each according to his ability to each according to his need.
Sadly, with the rot that has taken over academe and the appointment of Clinton and Obama judges, this very perverse mischief and destructive nonsense has gotten traction in academic law and jurisprudence.  A 2016 paper from the Stanford Social Innovation Review shows a similar distortion has become endemic in some philanthropy and public health dogma.
Almost all progressive projects have used long-term disingenuous attempts to twist fundamental concepts to support their goals.  Their goals are in fact predatory on the real public interest of maximizing aggregate human wellbeing and fairness among individuals.
As I have written before, and contrary to the collectivists, history shows the following promote human wellbeing and fairness: individualism; the rule of law; constitutionally limited government; separation of powers between national, regional and local units; separation of functional powers at each level of government; individual sovereignty and personal liberty; individual rights, not group entitlements; strong property rights; and high levels of economic freedom.
NH’s web site details how its mission evolved over 50 years from a meritorious focus on classical academic subjects of history, philosophy and literature to political activism.  Groups like NH are entitled to their views and pursuit of them, but not to public dollars to support their politics, any more than, say, libertarians.
Ron Knecht, MS, JD & PE(CA), has served Nevadans as state controller, a higher education regent, economist, college teacher and legislator.  Contact him at RonKnecht@aol.com.

Ron Knecht

775-882-2935
775-220-6128
 
www.RonKnecht.net

​My beloved brother Tom died and was buried last week.  An edited version of the eulogy by his second son Cody follows.
I once read, “If there is any immortality to be had among human beings, it is only in the love that we leave behind.”  We come together to remember a unique. loving life that bridged the world and broadened our horizons.  Dad lived life as an enduring independent spirit and left a legacy showing us how to navigate waters both rough and still.
To the world, he was a father.  To our family, he was the world.
Thomas Knecht was born May 22, 1950 in Belleville, Illinois to Wayne and Lela Knecht.  He led an uncommon life.
As a child, he was intrepid and undaunted. One episode involved the Mississippi River, a small boat, and almost being run over by a huge barge.  At seven, he suffered a serious injury that almost sent him home early.  Nonetheless, he endured and excelled in life, and graduated from Belleville Township High School West.
It was 1968, a time of global conflicts and cultural revolutions.   His next adventure was joining the US Air Force, leaving his parents and siblings Ron, Kathy, Lisa and Brent.  After basic training and tech school, he was stationed at Clarke Air Force Base in the Philippines – about as far as you can get from the Midwest.
Mark Twain once said, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow mindedness. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”
Immersed in a totally different land and culture, he served his country, made friends, attended the University of the Philippines, and met the woman with whom he would later have a family.  The path he took to “bridge the world.”  Dad bridged two cultures in creating his family.  Doing so, he expanded the views of his and our lives.
Among the writings he kept was this: “It is said that branches draw their life from the vine. Each is separate and yet all are one, as they share one main stem.”
Dad honored tradition and had a strong sense of duty. He and mom often cooked traditional German and Filipino foods. We grew up observing American and Filipino traditions.  He blessed us with servant leadership to his family.
He believed persistence and a good work ethic brings fulfillment of goals.
Tom was a jack of all trades. He could build a house, fix your car, cook a mean steak, write well, survive outdoors, talk philosophy, and much more.  He taught his children and others these invaluable skills.
He passed to us technical and problem-solving skills.  He also taught us to be critical thinkers and have an independent, objective view of life and current events.  Dad believed possessions are not the key to happiness, but he taught us to value things we had earned or were given.
In good times and bad, he was as consistent as the tide.  He never burdened us with the stress of financial or relational uncertainty.  He endeavored through life changes, taking things in stride.
He lived life on his terms and never lost his adventurous spirit.  He traveled and explored, taking many photos.  And he continued to develop the built environment and world around him.  He stayed busy, always on the move. Project after project, his hands were never idle.
As his own children became parents, he enthusiastically became grandpa.  He loved his grandchildren Brandon, Lacey, Evelyn, Benjamin, Lela, Jacob and Joshua with every fiber of his being.  He also loved his many nieces, nephews, aunts, uncles, parents and siblings.
Later, health issues arose.  He got treatment and was cautiously optimistic.  He kept high spirits and weathered the storm.  At a low point, he was blessed with a transplant three years ago.  We are forever grateful to the person who allowed us more time with him.
Then cancer gripped him.  Everyone knows he fought and endured this menace.  He didn’t give up.  On Sunday June 21, Father’s Day, Thomas Knecht passed on.  Dad went peacefully with dignity.  That day will always have an extra special meaning to us.
Ron Knecht, MS, JD &PE(CA), has served Nevadans as state controller, a higher education regent, economist, college teacher and legislator.  Contact him at RonKnecht@aol.com.

Ron Knecht

775-882-2935
775-220-6128
 
www.RonKnecht.net

​April 22 was the fiftieth anniversary of the first Earth Day.  Last week, I explained some basic errors of environmental and resource catastrophists highlighted annually by Earth Day.
Their major error is the Malthusian Fallacy.  It predicts catastrophe by making strong pessimistic assumptions about limitations on resource supplies, including environmental carrying capacities, and about future increases in demands (consumption), due to population and economic growth.  The result is future disaster, unless the supposedly inevitable trends are interrupted by prompt draconian governmental intervention.
Although the first such projection was made in 1798, this mechanism was still the primary model at the first Earth Day.  So it remains.  For alleged impending climate catastrophes, today’s disaster du jour, nothing less than collective coercion by many governments or a world government can stop future cataclysm, some people claim.
Their original Doomsday was projected as mass global starvation.  Now it’s runaway heating of the earth, threatening all life.  Where early goals were to avoid Silent Spring and to Save the Whales, we now must Save the Earth.
Early on, there were more scientific and sensible analyses than The Population Bomb, and competent analysts have for half-a-century debunked predictions of catastrophe.  Further, the measured results on the ground and in the air and waters have refuted such predictions.  This has not deterred many true believers from coughing up ever new nightmarish fantasies.
Julian Simon saw their key error: The only meaningfully limited resource is human creativity.  It mitigates pollution, finds resources no one imagined and extends supplies via technological change until substitutes are developed.  And higher population concentrations produce more creativity.
Government intervention stifles such creativity and exacerbates resource constraints and pollution.  Free people do much of this on their own, without central planning.  But catastrophists fail to foresee that, instead relying on their static, not broadly dynamic models.
Why?
One view is that people try to give their lives significance by placing themselves in a narrative arc.  Ronald Bailey explained recently in Reason magazine: “That arc typically traces civilization’s fall from a golden age through a current stage of decadence to an impending apocalypse—one that may, through the bold efforts of the current generation, usher in a new age.”
Frank Kermode, originator of these ideas in his 1967 book, The Sense of an Ending, said: “The great majority of interpretations of Apocalypse assume that the End is pretty near.”  But because it never arrives, “the historical allegory is always having to be revised. … Apocalypse can be disconfirmed without being discredited.  That is part of its extraordinary resilience.”
A similar version is that extreme environmentalism is ersatz religion.  It posits a Garden of Eden that was primitive nature on Mother Earth before the ascent of man.  Man committed original sin by eating the apple of knowledge and then began to subdue the fields and forests, animals of the land, sea and air, and exploit heedlessly all resources and pollute everything.
Salvation is possible only via the contrition of forsaking the evil human and technological progress and returning to life at the only “sustainable” level: primitivism.  Thus will we save our sinning selves by saving Mother Earth.  In the words of Henry David Thoreau, “In wilderness is the preservation of the world.”
A third version is that environmentalism is political ideology.  In this view, adherents’ main goal is to control other people and events: the ultimate extension of progressivism.  The enlightened environmentalists and scientific experts know what’s best for we unschooled masses and for society as a whole.  That’s why they claim a monopoly on science, which they bastardize.  Their science involves not continuous searching, hypothesizing and testing, but instead consensus.
Bailey concludes: “The dire prophecies of the first Earth Day have been mostly proven wrong, but the prophets of an always-impending environmental apocalypse have not thereby been discredited.  Auguries of imminent catastrophe remain resilient, even as the world of 2020 is in a much happier state than the Catastrophists of 1970 ever expected.”
Ultimately, all these versions seek to explain why environmental doomsayers are quite willing to sacrifice the broad public interest of maximizing human wellbeing and fairness – our prosperity delivered via individual liberty, private property and market freedom – to their special interests.
Ron Knecht, MSc, JD & PE(CA), has served Nevadans as state controller, a higher education regent, economist, college teacher and legislator.  Contact him at RonKnecht@aol.com.

On Earth Day, no less.  Enjoy and share. -- RK


Ron Knecht

775-882-2935
775-220-6128
 

​Next Wednesday is the fiftieth anniversary of the first Earth Day.  Annually, Earth Day highlights some fundamental errors of environmentalists.
The first error is the Malthusian fallacy.  In 1798, the English cleric Thomas Malthus predicted population would grow at an exponential rate, while food production would grow at a linear rate – resulting in disaster.  I’ll explain.
Exponential growth means, by definition, population would grow by a constant percentage annually.  Hence, population growth numbers each year would be greater than the growth numbers of the previous year.  The linear growth of food available means the harvest each year would be a constant amount greater of crops and livestock than in the previous year.
With population growing by ever greater numbers per year and available food growing only at a constant annual quantity, the average amount of food for each person would decline until malnutrition and starvation would overtake many poor folks.
His population growth reasoning was that both human fertility rates and death rates were constant.  So, population growth would continue annually at a rate equal to the difference between the fixed birth and death rates.  Thus, exponential growth.
His food availability reasoning was that only a constant rate of arable land could be added each year to production of crops and livestock.  This linear growth limit is implausible on its face, with population growing exponentially.  However, his exponential assumption about population growth, which seemed obvious to him and his peers, also errs, as history has proven.
The Environmental Handbook was the bible for the first Earth Day.  Its most remarkable prediction of disaster came from biologist Paul Ehrlich, who basically adopted and updated Malthus’ errors.  In the Handbook and elsewhere, he claimed devastating famines would kill tens of millions of people in the 1970s and even 100-million to 200-million in the 1980s.
Like other environmental doomsday prophesies, his was wildly wrong.  Thank goodness.
Many other Earth Day predictions were almost as spurious.  The catastrophists essentially adopted some version of Malthus’ very limited supply forecast for minerals, metals, fuels and other resources.  They also forecast people would be overwhelmed by various kinds of pollution, even as we exhausted resources, the use of which produces pollution.
They were spectacularly wrong on both counts, as the last half-century has shown.  But even as early as 1972, John Maddox showed directly and in extensive detail many of their errors in his book The Doomsday Syndrome.
At the same time, economist and demographer Julian Simon explained their key error: The only meaningfully limited resource is human creativity.  It extends theoretically finite resources via technological change and productivity growth to practically infinite levels, at least until substitutes are developed for those resources.  Human creativity also finds more recoverable resources in the earth than the minds of catastrophists can imagine.  And it hugely mitigates pollution.
Simon also showed that higher population concentrations produce higher per-person levels of creativity and thus more usable resources and less pollution.
A key element undermining the Malthusian fallacy is that government planning, command and control stifles this creativity and thus exacerbates resource and pollution constraints.  People operating under individual liberty, private property rights and free markets, not the heavy hand of government, do remarkable things to solve these problems and promote aggregate human well-being and fairness.
They do things catastrophists cannot foresee due to their static, not dynamic approach to analysis and forecasting.
Besides the things people do to expand the supply side and mitigate pollution, on the demand side – that is, growth in population – they also make adjustments on their own.  In the last half century, birth rates have fallen around the world.  In fact, in half the countries, including the US and half the world’s people, fertility rates are now below replacement levels.  So, the real population problem we now face is decline, not Ehrlich’s population bomb.
Another error environmentalists make is their forecasts and policy proposals are driven by ideological agendas, not by an unbiased quest for knowledge and service to the broad and true public interest.  Essentially, environmentalism has become an apocalyptic religion or left-wing political ideology that’s predatory upon the public interest.
In next week’s column, on Earth Day, I’ll explain that and other errors.
Ron Knecht, MSc, JD & PE(CA), has served Nevadans as state controller, a higher education regent, economist, college teacher and legislator.  Contact him at RonKnecht@aol.com.

Ron Knecht

775-882-2935
775-220-6128
 
www.RonKnecht.net

​The environmental movement flowered when I was in college.  I got active in it, as did many people, for the best of reasons.
Our basic motivation was that public policy in those days didn’t require public actions, industry, commerce and even some personal decisions to recognize and sometimes mitigate certain costs and problems they caused.  We needed to give those costs and problems appropriate weight in public and private decisions and mitigate them as appropriate.  We had to find the right balance points.
That lack of balance and appropriate mitigation has almost completely been remedied by laws, regulations and practices adopted in the last half century.  But we got so carried away with regulation, mitigation and even prohibition that years ago the pendulum swung well past the balance points in many areas.
Over-reach in applying the 1972 federal Clean Water Act (CWA) is a prime example.  The CWA was intended to protect waters from pollution and degradation for maximum benefit to all.  There were major problems in both the processes by which the act and its regulations were administered and the results.
One cause of those problems is that many people attracted to environmental activism and government regulation are not really interested in balance and the public interest.  They are special interest ideologues and zealots with agendas.
Also, when folks become government officials or employees, their natural instinct to expand their scope and means of control comes to the fore.  Then they stretch their constraints and the definitions and standards applicable to their real mission for more room to pursue their agendas.  They even make up powers and rules expedient to the goals of the insular cultures their agencies develop.
The other cause is that the CWA, like so much law and regulation in the 20th Century, centralized most decisions and rulemaking in Washington DC, too far away from where it would be applied to recognize the specific local problems and needs for different solutions.
Coupled with the self-selection of people into the insular culture and special-interest agency agendas, this insulation allowed their imaginations to run amok.  And to view people with competing interests, including balance, as ill-intentioned enemies they must stop and subjugate.  In a career as a professional and manager in regulation, public policy and administrative law and in the private sector dealing with all that, I saw these problems firsthand and continuously.
With the CWA, one main issue is the definition of water types and bodies to which federal regulation applies.  Surely it applies to our great lakes and rivers, but just as surely not to the rain that soaks into a farmer’s field or our lawns.
In presidential administrations since 1972, federal agencies, goaded by environmental activists, expanded the CWA’s reach to include isolated ponds, abandoned gravel pits, ephemeral waters and seasonal wetlands distant from and not directly feeding into navigable waterways.  In two major cases, the Supreme Court struck down some of these exotic attempts, but did not define the limits of federal CWA authority.  That, of course, was the duty of Congress.
As part of the Obama Administration’s transformative special-interest progressive agendas, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 2015 lopped off “navigable” from the term “navigable waters of the United States”.  Thus, they sought to give federal bureaucrats virtually unlimited authority in water matters.  Again the Supreme Court blocked this risible over-reach.
Recently, the Trump EPA sensibly adopted the Navigable Waters Protection Rule to rein in those excesses and sensibly clarify waters subject to federal control.  They include: territorial seas and traditional navigable waters; perennial and intermittent tributaries connecting to them; certain, lakes, ponds and impoundments (generally developed or managed by the Army Corps of Engineers); and wetlands adjacent to jurisdictional waters.
Waters not subject to federal control are: features containing water only directly from rain or snowfall; groundwater and ephemeral and seasonal wetlands not directly connected to navigable waters; many ditches, including most farm and roadside ditches; converted cropland; farm and stock watering ponds and waste treatment systems.
Real and necessary reform leaving local matters appropriately to states.
In a future column, I’ll address the other main CWA problem: endless, costly and risky litigation by the environmental zealots to stop reasonable projects.
Ron Knecht, MS, JD & PE(CA), has served Nevadans as state controller, a higher education regent, economist, college teacher and legislator.  Contact him at RonKnecht@aol.com.

Ron Knecht

775-882-2935
775-220-6128
 
www.RonKnecht.net

​In 1971, Dr. Patrick Moore, a PhD student in ecology, helped start Greenpeace in a church basement.  He was president of Greenpeace Canada for nine years and a director of Greenpeace International for seven years.
His old friends now call him an apostate environmentalist, a turncoat and a sellout.  He says, “they are the ones who have abandoned actual science and reasonable thinking in favor of emotional fearmongering and shameless political posturing.”
I know how he feels.  In the 1970s, as a University of Illinois energy researcher and graduate student, I founded the environmental and consumer opposition to the local nuclear plants and rate hikes proposed by the power company.  I also led the fight against the airport expansion and for bikeways in Urbana, and was involved in battles against damming of rivers and blanketing the state with more freeways.
An all-purpose, deeply involved environmentalist and green weenie until 1990.  After much reading and thinking, I saw through the mistakes underlying the cause and the turns it had taken, and I outgrew it.  Now, I exemplify politically an old Nevada saying: Nobody sings louder in the church choir than the reformed whore.
On television, Moore recently said, “The whole climate crisis is not only fake news, it’s fake science.”
But what about the scientific consensus in climate research?  He calls it a sham.  “Only 36 percent of scientists agree with the end-of-the-world scenario of global warming that fuels the UN climate agenda.”  A far cry from the usual 97 percent claim of the global warming industry.
He adds, “And there is a considerable element of groupthink, herd mentality, peer pressure, political pressure, support of certain energy policies, and a desire to ‘Save the Earth’ – whether it needs to be saved or not.”
“Yes, the world is modestly warming now.  Just like we were 1,000 years ago during the Medieval Warm Period and 2,000 years ago during the Roman Warm Period.  The fact is the Earth’s climate varies naturally – with little influence from human activity.”
About the Green New Deal – of which one of its architects said, “we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing” – Moore notes:
“The cost to each American household could be as high as $150,000 – or $16.3 trillion as a total for the nation.  The impact on America’s economy as a whole would be devastating, as those costs would have to be borne by families and private citizens who would otherwise use their monies to provide for better healthcare, education, living expenses, and a host of other things.”
It would also force the vast majority of Americans to either purchase an electric car or go without a motor vehicle altogether to phase out fossil fuel use by 2035 or sooner.
Energy costs would rise 25 percent in just the first few months of implementation of the Green New Deal.  When fully implemented, our gasoline prices would reach those of Europe, $8 per gallon – four times the $2 we now pay.  In time, prices would rise even further as all fossil fuel extraction on federal lands would 2cease and new coal, gas and nuclear plants would be banned.
“Drilling and mining will come to a screeching halt in most parts of America.  Most Americans who work in the energy or mining sectors would likely lose their jobs in short order.  Meanwhile, America’s competitors – like China and Russia – are sure to grow stronger as we diminish in stature as the world’s leading economic power.”
Here’s the kicker: basic choices we take for granted – like eating red meet, using air travel, and driving SUVs – could even be banned outright.  Climate elitists consider these things wasteful extravagances that contribute to a climate “emergency.”
The Green New Deal would even give some government officials full license to enter your home and grade its “sustainability.”  It calls for retrofitting “every building” for “maximal energy efficiency.”
Ultimately, even private home ownership is threatened.  As Kian Goh, a UCLA urban planning professor, recently wrote, “If we want to keep cities safe in the face of climate change, we need to seriously question the ideal of private homeownership.”
I didn’t really leave the environmental and green movement.  It left me and all reasonable people.
Ron Knecht, MS, JD & PE(CA), has served Nevadans as state controller, a higher education regent, economist, college teacher and legislator. Contact him at RonKnecht@aol.com.

Ron Knecht

775-882-2935
775-220-6128
 
www.RonKnecht.net