【美国人 20150421】地球日：庆祝我们的痛苦

满仓

【中文标题】地球日：庆祝我们的痛苦
【原文标题】Earth Day and the celebration of suffering
【登载媒体】美国人
【原文作者】Benjamin Zycher
【原文链接】http://www.aei.org/publication/earth-day-and-the-celebration-of-suffering/


2015年地球日的悲剧：昂贵的能源等于糟糕的生活。



在纪念第45个地球日之际，让我们回想一下呆伯特（译者注：美国一部连环漫画的主人公）的名言，这句话道出了政治哲学思想和圣贤般对人类生存条件的敏锐观察：“你无法拯救地球，除非你愿意牺牲他人。”

正如古语所说，真理不言自明。每年的地球日就像是一个全世界的宗教庆典，男女老少、思维健全、生活富有的人齐刷刷地宣称要把自己奉献给大地女神和对人类热爱的事业，同时表达自己对世俗幸福生活的鄙视，尤其是穷人的生活方式。如果你觉得这样的说法太过刺耳，就让我们来了解下最初地球日著名倡导者们的思想。1990年，罗马俱乐部在1968年的联合创始人、已故的亚历山大•金，在谈到用滴滴涕控制疟疾蔓延时说：

“当滴滴涕开始在民间得到应用时，我的疑惑慢慢出现。在几内亚，它只用两年时间就基本根除了疟疾。但是与此同时，人口的出生率翻倍……在事后，我对于滴滴涕的懊恼之处主要是因为它大幅恶化了人口问题。”

第二个例子是塞拉俱乐部前执行理事迈克尔•麦克洛斯基，在1971有关埃塞俄比亚饥荒的名言：

“我们最不应该做的事情就是提供援助……最好是让大自然寻求自身的平衡，让那些人饿死好了。”

全世界有数不清的穷人死于疟疾，最直接的原因就是多国联合禁止使用滴滴涕，因为人们对于它会对鸟类多样性造成的伤害怀有夸张的恐惧心理。对于那些手中没有财富的人群死亡的漠视，让我们不自然地联想到约瑟夫•斯大林有关死一个人和死几百万个人的区别的观点。正如苏联《真理报》曾经指出，当今的地球日思维延续了其诞生时的本意，这并非偶然。

为什么会这样？让我们思考一下，环境保护左派人士费尽九牛二虎之力试图让工业化和发展中经济体放弃使用化石燃料——煤炭、天然气——来发电，转而使用太阳能和风力等“可再生”能源。

这种可再生电力比传统发电方式更加昂贵的事实，是政治宣传攻势永远无法否认的事实，就像英国、德国和其它国家令人遗憾的探索一样。（顺便提一句，可再生电力的推广实际上增加了传统污染物和温室气体的排放量，这个事实与地球日的那些环境保护主义司仪们所宣扬的理论并不吻合。这个黑暗、带有讽刺意味的问题我们回头再讨论。）这些高额的成本必然会遏制电力的消耗量，无论是现在还是未来，这对于世界上极度贫穷、急需改善生活水平的人群来说，不啻于是一个噩耗。但是，环境保护左派人士不分青红皂白地制定了一条标准，发展中国家的电力消耗增量必须大部分，甚至全部来源于可再生能源，而无视其高额的成本、对GDP产生的影响，以及对人类寿命造成的影响。说到GDP，根据世界银行提供的150个国家从2011年到2013年的数据，人均电力消耗和人均GDP显示如下：



显然，相关性并不等于因果关系，电力消耗与GDP之间的关系可以说是互为因果的：经济规模越大，消耗的电力越多；更多的电力消耗（比如用来从事生产）让经济规模更大。两项数据之间的相关性可以确定为0.710，也就是说，一项数据增长1％，另一项数据就会增长0.71％。那么我们显然不能说，使用可再生能源取代传统能源发电所带来的成本上升，伴随着那些严重的负面效果，不会给GDP造成负面影响。再让我们来看看世界银行提供的人类寿命数据，人均GDP与寿命之间简单的相关性是0.613。相关性并不等于因果关系，那么你敢拍着良心说更富有不代表更健康吗？

那就让我们来看看电力消耗与寿命之间的关系。下图还是使用世界银行提供的数据。



两个数据之间简单的相关性是0.514。这就是2015年地球日的真面目：昂贵的能源等于短暂的生命。那些奉献给“可再生”电力的颂歌、要求降低温室气体排放的呼声、对“可持续性”宗教般的崇拜，以及其它那些障人眼目的数据，所有这一切都模糊了人类在遭受苦难这个基本的事实——这才是地球日的悲剧。




原文：

The tragic reality of Earth Day 2015: Expensive power equals less life.

In honor of this 45th anniversary of the first Earth Day, let us recall the wisdom of Dogbert, that noted political philosopher and sage observer of the human condition: “You can’t save the earth unless you’re willing to make other people sacrifice.”

As the old saying goes, truer words were never spoken. Earth Day brings each year a worldwide religious celebration at which large masses of people both right-thinking and affluent proclaim their devotion to Gaia and their love of humanity, while displaying their contempt for the lives and wellbeing of actual people, the poorest among them in particular. Should you find that judgment overly harsh, merely consider two musings from prominent organizers of the original Earth Day. In 1990, the late Alexander King, cofounder of the Club of Rome in 1968, argued in the context of the use of DDT to control malaria:

My own doubts came when DDT was introduced for civilian use. In Guyana, within two years it had almost eliminated malaria, but at the same time, the birth rate had doubled. … My chief quarrel with DDT in hindsight is that it has greatly added to the population problem.

Another second example came in 1971 courtesy of Michael McClosky, the former executive director of the Sierra Club, during an Ethiopian famine:

The worst thing we could do is give aid…. the best thing would be to just let nature seek its own balance and to let the people there just starve.

Tens or hundreds of millions of the world’s poor have died from malaria as a direct result of the multination ban on the use of DDT, driven by vastly exaggerated fears of its harmful effects on various bird species. This indifference to the death toll among the least fortunate is strangely reminiscent of Joseph Stalin’s view of the difference between one death and millions; and it is no accident, as Pravda used to put it, that the modern Earth Day mindset reflects that of the original.

How so? Let us consider the herculean efforts by the environmental left to move both the industrialized and developing economies away from electric power generated with fossil fuels — coal- and gas-fired generation — and toward “renewable” power generated with sunlight and wind flows.

That renewable power is vastly more expensive than conventional generation is an eternal truth that no amount of political propaganda can refute, as the British, Germans, and others have discovered to their regret. (As an aside, the expansion of renewable power increases the emissions of conventional pollutants and greenhouse gases, a reality rather inconsistent with the proclaimed concern of the Earth Day celebrants with environmental quality, a dark irony to be explored another day.) Those high costs must have the effect of reducing the consumption of electricity, both currently and prospectively, the latter the case in particular for the world’s poor striving (desperately) to achieve improved standards of living. But the environmental left simply demands as a matter of principle that the expansion of power generation capacity in the underdeveloped world be provided predominantly or exclusively by renewables, regardless of the undeniably higher costs and ensuing effects on GDP and, indeed, life expectancies. With respect to GDP, consider the data published by the World Bank for about 150 nations during 2011-2013, on per capita electricity consumption and per capita GDP, as illustrated in the following chart.

Obviously, correlation is not causation, and the relationship between electricity consumption and GDP is one of mutual causation: A bigger economy uses more power, and greater power consumption (for example, for goods production) makes the economy bigger. But the simple correlation between the two series is 0.710: A 1 percent increase in one is associated with a 0.71 percent increase in the other. It simply is not plausible that an increase in electricity costs driven by a substitution of renewable in place of conventional generation would fail to yield adverse effects on GDP, with the varied and serious negative effects attendant upon that impact. Using the World Bank data on life expectancies, the simple correlation between per capita GDP and life expectancies is 0.613; again, correlation is not causation, but can anyone argue with a straight face that wealthier is not healthier?

And so let us examine the relationship between electricity consumption and life expectancies. The following chart illustrates it, again using the World Bank data noted above.

The simple correlation between the two series is 0.514. And that is the central reality of Earth Day 2015: Expensive power equals less life. The paeans to “renewable” electricity, the demands for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, the religious fervor in support of “sustainability” and other nebulous parameters: All of the sound and fury will obscure the underlying human suffering that is the tragic reality of Earth Day.