Dennis Roddy is a senior adviser for Coldspark, a Pittsburgh-based Republican consulting firm.
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The unspoken truth about the environmental movement is that it has become a sort of class warfare.
On one side are mostly college-educated children of the professional class who find purpose in their lives — and oftentimes reliable incomes — waging holy war against hydrocarbons, raising a scare about fracking and insisting that manmade climate change is upon us.
They are partly right.
Climate change is happening and human activity surely plays some role. But the issues on which they are wrong could stall the progress of civilization and cost human lives in the very countries that would be forced to instantly deindustrialize to meet their demands of a carbon-free world.
After all, a surgeon in India has to get his light from somewhere. A village in China isn’t going to get clean water without the power to pump it to the tap.
On the other side are the people Kurt Vonnegut, in his novel of future dystopia, “Player Piano,” once referred to as “the reeks and the wrecks.” They are people without advanced degrees, who work with their hands, who are productive players in industries so battered by the economic change that accompanies grand shifts in technology and trade.
They’re the people we once called the working class. They still exist, but environmentalists hesitate to call them by their name anymore because they need to keep up the pretense that they’re on the same side as the workers.
All one needed to do to see this was visit the office of Bruce Nilles, then director of the Sierra Club’s “Beyond Coal” campaign. The Post-Gazette paid a call in 2010 and wrote of the map on his wall, with “A constellation of 508 red dots,” each representing a coal-fired generating station in the United States.
“It is his job,” the paper wrote, “to make these stars go dark, one-by-one.”
While groups such as the Sierra Club are quick to draw connections between melting Antarctic ice shields and a coal plant in North America, they don’t speak as willingly about the interconnections between a shuttered generating station and vanishing jobs hundreds of miles away.
Consider Erie, where more than 500 workers at General Electric’s diesel locomotive plant face layoffs. Already, cutbacks at that plant have surpassed the 1,000 mark. The locomotives made there were used primarily for hauling coal, and when demand vanishes for one product, so does demand for another, and the jobs that go with both of them.
With a nearly 4-to-1 job multiplier effect, the loss of those jobs in Erie will resonate. The earlier layoffs at GE came a few years ago, at the same time 250 workers at the Homer City electrical generating station in Indiana County were fighting off an attempt by the Sierra Club and its ally, Earth Justice, to shut down their plant. After a widely publicized fight, the plant installed new equipment. It recently emerged from its second bankruptcy in five years.
In Greene County, Pennsylvania’s last longwall mine has struggled to stay open in the wake of a regulatory tug-of-war between coal miners and The Sierra Club and, with a name utterly deaf to irony, The Center for Coalfield Justice.
The downstream job multiplier for coal and energy products, by the way, has been estimated at 10 to 1.
The anti-coal agenda has found its corollary in the anti-drilling movement. Even as American hydrocarbon emissions drop as natural gas replaces other, carbon-heavy power sources, the good-deeds racket has launched a campaign of misinformation and fundraising in which science has been replaced by superstition.
The political foothold it has gained is shocking. Right now, the stated policy of the Democratic Party of Pennsylvania, in a resolution passed three years ago, calls for an end to the hydraulic fracturing technology that has created tens of thousands of jobs and made Pennsylvania the second-largest energy producer in the nation.
Given the resurgent role of political parties in shaping policy, this ought to worry all of us. With coal being crushed by ideologues, the party currently in possession of the governor’s office in Pennsylvania is basically on record in favor of shutting down the gas wells, too.
It is hard to know which will disappear first: coal or the arctic ice, but it’s a sure bet the disappearance of either is going to diminish life on the planet. One will raise the sea levels. The other will drown entire nations and their cultures in a tide of despair.
First Published: October 1, 2017, 4:00 a.m.
