I'm specifically speaking of the utter scam run on people when it comes to environmental issues.

Its not really their fault, but on the other hand it is: They simply don't have the experience of what was, as they weren't born yet (or in some cases were born but not yet sentient -- the age at which that occurs does vary some but nobody can argue they were at birth, for example.)

Further, and probably more-seriously, the decline of written material means that those who seek to lie can trivially erase things they don't want to admit for the purpose of deliberately misleading you.  That's hard to do with a physical book except by burning it, which leaves plenty of evidence since the book used to exist and no longer does.  In the world of electronic media you can change "history" and unless someone made a copy beforehand nobody's the wiser.  Witness the change in the dictionary definition of the word "vaccine" (yeah, go look it up -- you'll be shocked.)

Of course the physical presence of a book cannot compel you to read it.  Witness those who have never read both The Federalist and The Anti-Federalist.  If you're among them you have no concept of what the Founders envisioned and why the Constitution was constructed as it is, nor why the 10 original Amendments were required in order to ratify it.  Those two written works are literally the debate between the Founders of this nation and present two quite-different aspects to that debate and process.  You cannot claim to understand that process and thus are not qualified to enter into a debate as to what is and isn't appropriate to change unless you've read both and thus understand how the original decisions were reached.

Politicians and others who seek to influence society often pander to the part of the population who never had the background information to make informed choices.  One of the key points in the modern era is usually "environmentalism"; the goal itself is good but the incremental improvement available in America now is tiny and the cost astronomical.  That's right -- we already did it and those who lived through that time period know it and we don't have to read about it -- we directly experienced it.

There is a basic principle that essentially-always applies: The first 80% of any problem is trivially solved at reasonable cost.  The last 20% is exponentially harder as one approaches 100%, and further the resource expenditure in doing so, whether in time, month or both, goes vertical.

People claim we must "save Gaia" (the planet), for example.

Reality: The planet, in the context of America, is in better condition today than at any time in the last 150 years.

You think not?

Let's count just a few examples out of literal thousands:

• The predominant heating fuel until fairly recently was wood or raw coal in either an open fire or crude stove.  Combustion of same was woefully incomplete emitting a huge amount of tar and similar into the air.  While wood is still used in some areas for efficiency reasons most stoves are now of either a "rocket" or catalytic design and thus emit much less.
  
  
• Even in the 1970s the water was wildly polluted as was the air in the United States.  I distinctly remember both including watering eyes whenever driving past a chemical plant (of which there was one near my home), river water you could not safely swim in nor eat the fish from and similar.  Today there are no chemical plant fumes there and the water in the same place is clean -- and you can eat the fish.  This is true literally all over America; Love Canal anyone?  Not one person younger than about 50 remembers any of this but it is fact.
  
  
• Until 1975 there were no catalytic converters on cars.  Every single vehicle stank -- badly -- from the moment it was started until it was shut off.  The early catalysts, however, were not particularly efficient and because those engines still had no closed-loop control they were hot enough to start fires if you parked over dry material -- and sometimes did.  Modern closed-loop systems showed up in the early 1990s; the reduction of pollutant emissions by modern vehicles compared with engines prior to that time exceeds 99%.  At the same time fuel economy dramatically improved because closed-loop operation allows the engine to run at almost-exactly stochiometric mixtures and therefore the engine does not deliberately waste fuel to avoid damage from lean combustion.  Indeed the CO reduction in modern automobiles is so extreme that it is actually fairly difficult to kill yourself deliberately via CO poisoning using a modern car engine where with older, pre-catalyst engines you could literally do so in minutes.  Simply put unless you're older than 40 in the US you never lived in a world where air quality was this good.  All the bellyaching about vehicle emissions and thus the claimed "need "for electric cars in the modern world, in short, is flat-out bullshit.
  
  
• Older coal-fired things, whether power plants or steel mills, were hideously nasty emitters of pollutants.  Modern coal-fired power plants (which the EPA is now trying to kill with impossible to meet regulations) are 90-95% cleaner in both Sulfur Dioxide and Nitrogen Oxide emissions compared with the same plant in the 1950s yet nobody ever considers that for the exact same amount of electricity produced they now emit 1/20th of the pollution they did just 50 years ago and will keep the lights on as long as they have fuel.  Nonetheless they're not as efficient as natural gas since the combustion temperature is lower and they cannot run combined-cycle, which natural gas plants can -- and thus on a per-unit-of-energy cost basis, depending on the price of both fuels, natural gas is frequently cheaper.

The Laws of Thermodynamics are not suggestions; no law passed by man can change them.  All transformations of energy involve loss; this is guaranteed by thermodynamics.  Thus the most efficient way to do a given thing is always to use whatever form of energy is available that can be used directly without transformations and is of lowest all-in cost.

In addition intermittent sources of electricity (e.g. solar and wind), for example, will never win compared with either atomic energy or combustion fuels and all of them require seriously-toxic chemical processes to construct, have limited lifetimes and present serious disposal costs and environmental mitigation on the back end that everyone always ignores.  Windmill blades are made out of fiberglass, which in turn is made from oil, and they are not recyclable.  In addition they kill birds by the millions because while it looks like the blades are turning slowly at the tip the rate of movement is in fact nearly supersonic and a bird cannot see it.  Solar cells require nasty chemicals and rare earth metals to produce which in return requires digging up huge amounts of land to acquire them and when either damaged or they wear out they too present serious environmental risk.  If destroyed by bad weather such as hailstorms the damage to the environment from the release of those materials (onto the ground under them) is severe and immediate.  In addition both are unreliable and this efficiency problem cannot be overcome because while solar and wind are great when the sun is shining or wind blowing (1) collecting that energy covers vast amounts of land compared with all the other alternatives and (2) you have to have available another form of generation all the time, and pay for it to be available, otherwise you have no electricity when they're not available.  Since covering that potential lack of capacity is equally expensive as just buying and staffing the nuclear or carbon-fueled plant in the first place you're basically choosing to double your power bill and may I remind you that every single thing we do in our economy -- and thus its price -- has energy in it.  Your grocery store, for example, needs both lights and the power to run the refrigerators or you have no meat, dairy and similar -- and that power has to work 100% of the time.

Further while heat pumps for heating use win in some circumstances against a natural gas furnace they lose a good part of the time, and not by a little either, especially when it gets materially cold outside.  The exact cross-over point is easy to compute  given the price of both power and gas along with the efficiency of the heat pump at a given temperature (its just simple math) but in every case where electricity has been moved off carbon-based fuels to renewables it is a near-certainty that natural gas will win on cost -- and not by a little and in addition the maximum demand for heating is of course in the winter at night -- when there is never any solar energy available.  I've written a column on this; heat pumps only win in moderate temperatures if electricity is cheap or if you're forced to use Propane because there is no piped gas; otherwise you are way ahead to simply burn the gas directly in your furnace.

This same cost issue applies to all commerce!  If you wish to force businesses, for example, to use heat pump or other electric heating fuels you will radically increase their costs and guess who gets to pay that in the price paid in the store?

Further natural gas is a nearly-pollutant-free energy resource.  Yes, it produces CO2 when burned (and water vapor); neither is a pollutant.  CO2 is plant food.  Since you either eat the plants yourself or you eat what eats the plants increasing the growth rate of plants is a public good rather than a menace.  You would like lower cost food rather than higher -- or worse, not enough food at all -- yes?  And may I remind you that one of the key components of fertilizer for crops is in fact made from..... natural gas!

It is true that the climate changes.  It always has and always will.  What is not true is that we are evil SOBs who are out to destroy the climate or the Earth generally by polluting it; on the contrary; the data is that has been no change at all in, for example, the total energy in tropical cyclones since we began to be able to accurately compute that (e.g. since the satellite era began and thus we can "see" all the hurricanes where before satellites many were undetected since unless the storm hit land  -- and many do not -- only the poor SOB who ran into it at sea by accident knew about it.)

Indeed some of the things we've done to clean up the planet have actually allowed more solar energy to reach the surface.  Specifically we have insisted on far lower-sulfur fuels for ocean-going ships which reduces sulfur dioxide emissions and that makes the air more-clear thus more solar energy reaches the surface.  The same thing is true for coal-fired power plants over the last 50 years; that is, we have in fact increased the amount of solar energy reaching the surface of the planet  by a small amount because we made the air cleaner.  This of course is the exact opposite of what you're told and sold by those screaming about "climate change."

There are lots of people who wish to lie to you about both history and where we are now for the purpose of making money.  Never forget that in any regulated line of business -- that is, where there's a monopoly of any sort whether "natural" or otherwise, since profit margins are capped the only way to make more money is to force the total amount of spending to go up.

Power companies are natural monopolies; there is only one set of power lines to your house or business.  You have a personal incentive to, for example, improve the seal around your windows because it reduces your heating and air conditioning costs.  The power company cannot cause you to consume more power by breaking your windows or removing your weather stripping and their profit margin is capped by the rate-setting process so the only way for them to make more money is to "agree" that if you are forced to use electricity instead of gas the climate will be irrevocably ruined and thus you will be compelled to spend more money to heat your house or buy and operate a vehicle even though that claim of "permanent ruination" is a lie.

Likewise the car companies are all in on the government mandating all these new "nannies" (e.g. lane-keeping, blind spot monitoring and similar.)  Why is it that the crash rate has not gone down if these things actually work?  Obviously they do not work otherwise the crash rate would drop like a stone and it hasn't.  But what has happened is that the cost of cars and insurance has risen dramatically with a large part of the cost increase being in the mandated "nannies" and the expense when one of them gets broken; instead of a $200 windshield now its $1,000 because the camera and other sensors has to be realigned at the dealer.  The insurance company has its profit margin capped so the only way for them to make more money is to force up the cost of vehicles and collision repairs so they therefore can charge more for the insurance!  You are told this improves safety but the data says it has not; all it has done is drive up the price which you are forced to pay even if you don't buy a new car because you might be at fault in an accident and the other guy did buy the new car with all the fancy mandated gadgets on it.

If you're young you might fall for the "imminent ruination" of the environment and planet generally because you've never seen it so much worse than it is now.  You see, in 1970 you weren't alive -- but I was, and I remember it.  You've never seen America look like this because you were never alive when it did.

I was.

It no longer is.

The air is no longer poisoned.  The factories and chemical plants no longer belch eye-watering fumes and poison the water to the point you cannot swim in it or eat the fish.  The tailpipe of your car no longer belches fumes that can kill you in minutes and being caught in traffic does not cause you to choke on the unburned hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide.  Earth has quite-literally never been healthier; no longer do you get polio from your drinking water as that disease is fecal/oral in transmission.  No, it was not the vaccine that stopped it; it was in fact the improvement in public sanitation as the case rate was dropping like a stone before the vaccine was introduced.

So-called "Green Energy" is a scam; it is neither green nor are we destroying the planet by exploiting carbon.  On the contrary; we have wildly cleaned up the planet from our previous actions, it is in better condition today than any time in the last 150 years and all of that has happened while we have built more vehicles and consumed more carbon-based energy than ever.  Indeed the cleaning of the air has led to more solar radiation reaching the surface of the Earth because we cleaned up the air, not the other way around, and this is a good thing since I presume you'd prefer not to choke on dirty air.

Don't fall for the scam: It is nothing more than yet another grift designed to make your poor for the benefit of a few monopolists and their cronies in government.  Tell them to cut that crap out and if they don't you will cut them out rather than be impoverished by their deliberate, malicious lies.