Debunking Environmental Myths: Overblown Messages Challenged With Facts

Garbage is offloaded into a landfill in Michigan on July 28, 2022. Paul Sancya/AP Photo

Commentary

Many of us who’ve been working in the environmental industry for a long time are greatly disillusioned with environmental groups and much of the mainstream media. Count me in this group.

After 38 years of practicing as a chemist in the environmental industry, I believe that environmental advocates have grown increasingly deceptive over the decades, even as our nation’s environment has grown ever cleaner.

Put aside global warming for the moment. If alarmist environmental groups expect the public to find their dire predictions about climate change credible, shouldn’t the credibility be based on their record regarding other environmental topics? In many cases, that record is embarrassingly shameful. By shouting loud enough, for long enough, they’ve successfully championed false narratives that persist to this day. Millions of ordinary, well-meaning people continue to try to help “save the planet” by following flawed guidance that has seeped its way into the storehouse of conventional wisdom.

With that background in mind, here are my top four overblown environmental messages to which people continue to respond:

1. We’re Running Out of Landfill Space/We Must Recycle

At no point in time was the United States ever running out of landfill space. There was a period about 30 years ago when the number of landfills was dropping. The numbers were dropping quite quickly, in fact. That was a result of old, relatively small infills that were located close to municipalities falling out of fashion and closing. They would be replaced by so-called mega fills. These are large, modern landfills located far from populated areas and engineered with modern environmental standards in mind. So although the number of landfills decreased, overall landfill acreage didn’t.

The idea that we must recycle because the landfills are overflowing was and is a ridiculous talking point. The United States has plenty of landfill space in existing landfills and plenty of room to build more as we need them. Collectively, all of the landfills in the United States take up a very small fraction of land. One could place all of the active landfills in the United States in a midsized Midwestern county and have room to spare.

2. Our Forests Are Disappearing

If the United States is ever in danger of running out of trees, it won’t be because we’re cutting too many down or not planting enough. It will be because the government’s management of our forests has grown so incredibly incompetent that they'll be consumed by an ever-increasing number of wildfires.

Large-scale National Forest management started about a century ago and has seen a steady growth in forested lands throughout the nation. The big forestry companies such as Weyerhaeuser and Georgia Pacific long ago realized that they, too, are subject to the laws of mathematics and therefore must plant as much or more than they harvest in order to keep their business models going. Is there a rainforest problem in South America? I think so. Are North American forests overharvested? Not at all.

3. Burning Fossil Fuel in the U.S. Is ‘Dirty’ and Dangerous to Public Health

Reminder: Climate change is off the table in this discussion. We’re talking only about “conventional” criteria and hazardous pollutants right now.

Over the centuries since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, we’ve grown increasingly more efficient at pulling more and more energy out of fossil fuels and at reducing the amount of pollutants generated while doing so. People living in the Third World who burn wood or dung while living within tightly packed quarters are exposed to far more hazardous and criteria pollutants than anyone in more-modern countries that utilize efficient, state-of-the-art, and closely regulated systems to produce the maximum power per capita at the lowest possible price.

If one finds carbon dioxide emissions especially troubling, one could conceivably characterize fossil fuel emissions as “dirty.” In every other sense, modern fossil fuel combustion is amazingly clean and incredibly more energy efficient than the “green energy” plans that extreme environmental activists have dreamed up over the years.

4. Overpopulation

Contrary to what you may have heard, the planet isn’t overcrowded. If we gave every person on the planet a couple of square feet to stand in, Earth’s population would fit inside the city of Houston. That’s it. And now demographic changes tell us that underpopulation is going to be the problem very soon for a great number of countries. Yet, the myth persists that the planet is overcrowded.

It’s true that we don’t always do a great job of getting resources to where they’re needed, but that’s about logistics, not supply.

There are plenty more examples such as this. It’s baffling to find that the humorless, hysterical messages of the environmental movement continue to be taken seriously by so many. Ignorance may be to blame, or perhaps it’s a simple matter of self preservation. Probably, it’s a mixture of both.

Whatever the reason, rarely in the course of human events have so many been so wrong so often.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.