Capitalism’s sustainable and key to environmental protection---and alt destroys it

But what is the true relationship between capitalism, environmental destruction and climate change? If we compare the ranking of the countries with the highest environmental standards with the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom, we see a different connection than the one purported by Klein.

For more than 20 years, researchers at Yale University have been publishing the Environmental Performance Index (EPI), which ranks countries according to their environmental health and ecosystem vitality. The EPI uses a total of 32 performance indicators in eleven categories:147

1.Air Quality

2.Sanitation and Drinking Water

3.Heavy Metals

4.Waste Management

5.Biodiversity and Habitat

6.Ecosystem Services

7.Fisheries

8.Climate Change

9.Pollution Emissions

10.Water Resources

11.Agriculture

According to Yale University’s analyses, Denmark, Luxembourg, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and France are the highest-ranked countries, followed by Austria, Finland, Sweden, Norway and Germany. The 2020 report states, “One of the consistent lessons of the EPI is that achieving sustainability requires sufficient economic prosperity to fund public health and environmental infrastructure.”

The researchers find that there is a clear positive correlation between environmental performance and per capita GDP.148

An interesting comparison can be made between the EPI and the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom, which has been measuring economic freedom around the globe since 1995. The Index, which is also referred to as the capitalism index by the sociologist Erich Weede,149 analyzes the level of economic freedom in 178 countries and applies twelve criteria, all of which are weighted equally:

1.Property Rights

2.Judicial Effectiveness

3.Government Integrity

4.Tax Burden

5.Government Spending

6.Fiscal Health

7.Business Freedom

8.Labor Freedom

9.Monetary Freedom

10.Trade Freedom

11.Investment Freedom

12.Financial Freedom

The ten most economically free countries in the world in the 2021 Index are:

1.Singapore

2.New Zealand

3.Australia

4.Switzerland

5.Ireland

6.Taiwan

7.United Kingdom

8.Estonia

9.Canada

10.Denmark

According to the 2021 Index, the countries with the lowest levels of economic freedom are North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, Sudan and Zimbabwe. The 178 countries are all grouped into five categories: “Free,” “Mostly Free,” “Moderately Free,” “Mostly Unfree” and “Repressed.” The Heritage Foundation’s researchers compared the two indices—Yale University’s Environmental Performance Index and their own Index of Economic Freedom—for the year 2020 and found that the countries with the highest levels of economic freedom also had the highest EPI scores, averaging 76.1, while the “Mostly Free” countries averaged 70.2. There is then a big gap to the “Moderately Free” countries, which were rated much lower (59.6 points) for their environmental performance. The “Mostly Unfree” and “Repressed” countries registered by far the worst environmental performance (46.7 and 50.3 points in the EPI, respectively).150

To smooth out the dynamic developments in the Index of Economic Freedom, it makes sense to take each country’s average score over the 15 years from 2006 to 2020. This compensates for the kind of one-off effects that can result from short-term policy measures. These averages can then be compared with the Environmental Performance Index scores from 2020. The data reveal a clear positive correlation (the correlation coefficient is 0.67). A regression analysis also confirms that for every one-point increase in the Economic Freedom Index, there is a 1.06-point increase in the Environmental Performance Index. Such a high coefficient, combined with the very strong correlation between the indexes, suggests a clear statistical relationship. This correlation can be explained by the causality between increased capitalism and greater technological progress and prosperity.

The economist Daniel Fernández Méndez addressed the potential objection that countries with greater economic freedom “are ‘exporting’ their polluting industries to the less free third world, while keeping non-polluting industries in their country.”151 However, this is clearly not the case. His analysis of the investments made by countries with high environmental standards reveals that only 0.1 percent of their foreign investments flow to countries with low environmental standards. Méndez’s conclusions are clear: “With the data analyzed, we can see that capitalism suits the environment. The greater the economic freedom, the better the environmental quality indexes. The ‘cleaner’ countries do not export their pollution by relocating companies.”152

In 2016, researchers published a study in the journal Sustainability that included an evaluation of the correlation between the EPI and the Open Market Index (OMI) compiled by the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC).153 The OMI measures a country’s openness to free trade and is thus an important indicator of economic freedom. The researchers found a high degree of overlap between the OMI and the EPI: 19 of the OMI’s 27 highest-scoring countries also appear in the top 27 of the EPI. The survey covered a total of 75 countries, including all G20 and EU members. Together, these countries account for more than 90 percent of international trade and investment. The researchers conclude: “It is evident that there is a strong connection between OMI and EPI scores, supporting our hypothesis that countries with an open economy score higher in environmental performance. Overall, our evidence shows that the level of the openness of an economy is associated with a country’s environmental protection.”154

Another study, “Is Free Trade Good for the Environment?” by Antweiler, Copeland and Taylor, uses sophisticated mathematical modeling to explore the correlation between free trade—a key feature of capitalism—and environmental pollution. The study finds: “Our estimates of the scale and technique elasticities indicate that if openness to international markets raises both output and income by 1%, pollution concentrations fall by approximately 1%. Putting this calculation together with our earlier evidence on composition effects yields a somewhat surprising conclusion: freer trade is good for the environment.”155

Of course, it can be argued that capitalism leads to stronger economic growth, which in turn leads to an increase in resource consumption. Following this logic, the most economically inefficient systems should actually be best for the environment since they result in slower growth. However, the above analyses show “that, at an early stage of a country’s economic growth, a high level of environmental degradation is observed, while, after a critical point of economic growth, a gradual decline in environmental degradation is reported.”156

In addition, there are two real-world observations that also disprove the argument that stronger economic growth automatically leads to greater environmental pollution:

1.In non-capitalist countries, environmental degradation has been a far more serious problem than in capitalist countries.

2.The correlation between economic growth and increasing resource consumption is becoming ever weaker in the age of dematerialization.

Let’s begin with the first point. Nowhere has environmental degradation been as bad as in the former socialist states. Is this a relevant argument? Yes, because if an economic order based on private property, competition, and freely set prices were the cause of environmental pollution, then, logically, there would have to be significantly less pollution in countries that do not have these characteristics—which is not the case. Moreover, as we have seen, anti-capitalist climate activists, such as Naomi Klein, want to establish an economic order in which the state has disproportionately greater power than under capitalism. Their prescription against climate change and pollution is more state planning. However, in countries where the state has held the most power over the economy, levels of environmental degradation were not lower. On the contrary, they were far higher than in other countries. Of course, it is not beyond human imagination to dream up numerous ideal systems in which the state commands the economy and solves all of the problems of pollution and climate change. However, you already know that I refuse to address such pure thought constructs or utopian models because I believe it is more instructive to deal with history and learn from it. Therefore, I will now proceed to show in detail that non-capitalist states and state-planned economies have not only failed to solve environmental problems, but have made them much worse than in capitalist countries.

In 1990, Zhores A. Medvedev took stock for the Soviet Union: “The Soviet Union has lost more pasture and agricultural land to radioactive contamination than the total acreage of cultivated land in Switzerland. More land has been flooded by hydroelectric dams than the total area of the Netherlands. More land was lost between 1960 and 1989 through salinization, changes in the water table, and dust and salt storms than the total areas of cultivated land in Ireland and Belgium put together. Amidst acute food shortages, the total acreage of cultivated land has declined by one million hectares a year since 1975. The Soviet Union is losing its forests at the same rate as rainforests are disappearing in Brazil. In Uzbekistan and Moldavia, chemical poisoning with pesticides has led to such high rates of mental retardation that the educational curricula in secondary schools and universities have had to be modified and simplified.”157 In their 1992 book, Ecocide in the USSR, Murray Feshbach and Alfred Friendly Jr. concluded that “no other industrial civilization so systematically and so long poisoned its land, air, and people.”158

A well-known example of the parlous and perilous state of environmental protection in the USSR is the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, which occurred on April 26, 1986, in reactor four of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. What most people probably don’t know is that this nuclear power plant proudly bore the official name Vladimir Lenin Nuclear Power Plant (Чернобыльская АЭС им. В. И. Ленина) in honor of the communist figurehead and state founder because, after the accident, Chernobyl became synonymous with the general dangers of nuclear energy rather than the environmental hazards allowed to run rampant under socialism.

In his definitive, 560-page work, Midnight in Chernobyl, the British journalist and author Adam Higginbotham demonstrates that the world’s greatest-ever nuclear disaster was a direct result of endemic problems at almost every level of the Soviet economic system. This fact was clear from the moment construction of the plant commenced: “Key mechanical parts and building materials often turned up late, or not at all, and those that did were often defective. Steel and zirconium—essential for the miles of tubing and hundreds of fuel assemblies that would be plumbed through the heart of the giant reactors—were both in short supply; pipework and reinforced concrete intended for nuclear use often turned out to be so poorly made it had to be thrown away.”159

The roof of the turbine hall of the power plant was covered with highly flammable bitumen, although this was contrary to the regulations. The reason: the more flame-retardant material that was supposed to be used was not even being manufactured in the USSR.160 The concrete was defective and the workers lacked power tools—a team of KGB agents and informants at the plant reported a continuous series of building faults.161 As the plant’s fourth reactor approached completion, a time-consuming safety test on the unit turbines had not been completed by Moscow’s deadline for completion on the last day of December 1983.162

Investigations in the Soviet Union after the accident confirmed that the RBMK reactor type was not up to modern safety standards and even before the accident would never have been allowed to operate beyond the borders of the USSR.163 “The accident was inevitable … If it hadn’t happened here and now, it would have happened somewhere else,” conceded Prime Minister of the USSR Nikolai Ryzhkov.164

Soviet authorities initially tried to cover up the full scale of the accident, just as they had covered up a long chain of previous accidents at nuclear power plants. As one of the twelve founding members of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), since 1957 the Soviet Union had been obliged to report any nuclear accident that took place within its borders. Nevertheless, none of the dozens of dangerous accidents that occurred inside Soviet nuclear facilities over the decades that followed were ever mentioned to the IAEA. “For almost thirty years, both the Soviet public and the world at large were encouraged to believe that the USSR operated the safest nuclear industry in the world.”165 In contrast, the comparatively harmless accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power station near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on March 28, 1979, was exploited by Soviet officials as an example of how unsafe nuclear power plants are under capitalism.166 Many media outlets in Western Europe uncritically adopted this distortion of the facts.

After the accident at the Vladimir Lenin Nuclear Plant in Chernobyl, Soviet officials stuck to the cover-up and claimed that the cause of the disaster was nothing more than human error. In a high-profile show trial, a number of the power plant’s employees were sentenced. But Valery Legasov, deputy director of the Soviet Institute of Atomic Energy, finally came to the conclusion that it was the “profound failure of the Soviet social experiment, and not merely a handful of reckless reactor operators, that … was to blame for the catastrophe.”167 In an interview with the literary journal Novy Mir, he warned that another Chernobyl catastrophe could occur at any of the USSR’s other RMBK nuclear power plants at any time.168

The expert, wracked by illness and despair over what had happened, having studied the accident and its causes more intensively than probably anyone else, recorded a memoir on tape, which was published in Pravda soon after his death (this was possible at the time because it was the peak of the freedoms afforded to the editors of the Party-controlled media by Gorbachev’s glasnost in early 1986). In the September 1988 article, Legasov stated: “After I had visited Chernobyl NPP, I came to the conclusion that the accident was the inevitable apotheosis of the economic system which had been developed in the USSR over many decades … It’s My Duty To Say This.”169

The causes were so deeply rooted in the structure of the planned economic system that efforts by Soviet politicians and scientists to change things after the disaster were unsuccessful. An internal report to the Central Committee of the CPSU, prepared a year after the accident at Chernobyl, noted that in the twelve months since the disaster, 320 equipment failures had occurred at Soviet nuclear power plants, and that 160 of them led to emergency reactor shutdowns.170 All of these—like the numerous accidents before them—were concealed. In the GDR, the central organ of the communist youth organization FDJ, Junge Welt, ran the following headline on May 2, 1986: “Western Scaremongering Seeks to Distract from Peace Initiatives.”171

Not only was the Soviet Union’s environmental record disastrous, but so was that of the second major socialist country, the People’s Republic of China. Steven Pinker’s book Enlightenment Now includes a chart that tracks carbon intensity, or CO2 emissions per dollar of GDP, from 1820 to 2014.172 As countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom began to industrialize, they emitted more and more CO2 per dollar of GDP. From the 1950s onward, however, the graph clearly confirms that emissions per dollar of GDP have been falling and falling.

A closer analysis of the graph confirms that China was an extreme outlier in the late 1950s, with carbon intensity rising more dramatically than in any other country and at any other time since 1820. This was entirely due to the greatest socialist experiment in human history, Mao’s Great Leap Forward. Not only did this experiment cause the greatest famine in history and kill 45 million people,173 it was also an ecological disaster. To the outside world, Mao’s propaganda constantly trumpeted new record figures in all fields as China sought to prove the progress and superiority of socialism. In particular, steel production was held up as a measure by which to demonstrate the country’s progress under socialism. Mao was obsessed with steel and could recite the steel production figures for all of the world’s major economies. In 1957, China’s steel production was 5.35 million tons; in January 1958, Mao issued a target of 6.2 million tons; and in September, the target was doubled to 12 million.174 These colossal goals were to be achieved primarily with small blast furnaces operated by villagers in the backyards of the people’s communes. Many of these furnaces did not work properly, which is why they mainly produced low-grade material. Iron ingots produced by rural communes were piled up everywhere, and they were so small and brittle that they were unsuitable for modern rolling mills.175 In late December 1958, even Mao was forced to admit to a top official that 40 percent of the steel was unusable. The steel that could be used had all been produced in conventional steel mills, and the worthless 40 percent came from the small furnaces.176 At the same time, because of the backyard furnaces, emissions increased massively and economic output declined, which explains China’s position as an absolute outlier in Pinker’s graph on carbon intensity.

It is not the “unrestrained pursuit of profit” by capitalists, but planned economics and socialism that have caused the greatest environmental destruction—not only in the Soviet Union and China, but in all socialist countries.

China is following Western countries on the decarbonization pathway, although it did take a bit more time to get started. The same, incidentally, is true of India. In China, CO2 emissions per dollar of GDP peaked in the late 1970s, while India’s were highest in the mid-1990s, after which the previously dirigiste subcontinent moved toward a market economy. The result: carbon intensity for the world as a whole has been declining for half a century.177

After the collapse of socialism, it was finally possible to take stock. The socialist countries had long boasted of their pioneering role in environmental protection. As early as 1968, East Germany (also referred to as the German Democratic Republic or GDR) added protecting the environment to its constitution as a state objective. Then, in 1972—beating West Germany by 15 years—it established its own Ministry of the Environment.178 East German propaganda constantly claimed that capitalism was to blame for environmental destruction and that only socialism, with its state-run, planned economy, could ensure a clean environment. But how did reality stack up against such claims?

In 1990, a report was published by the Federal Foundation set up to come to terms with the GDR’s past. The report stated: “The ecological problems … are devastating. The population of the GDR encounters environmental pollution almost everywhere. Particularly serious is the air pollution caused by sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide created by the burning of lignite. Lignite is the largest source of energy in the GDR, but the power plants are outdated; there is a lack of desulfurization equipment. The pollution is so severe that many people in the most affected regions, e.g. around the industrial centers of Leipzig, Halle, Karl-Marx-Stadt and Dresden, suffer above-average respiratory diseases and eczema. The ‘industrial fog’ regularly triggers smog alarms in towns and villages, leaving layers of dust on cars, windowsills and laundry hung out to dry in the open. Water bodies are also highly polluted. The chemical industry discharges untreated wastewater that pollutes rivers and lakes. The joke ‘Everything is gray in the GDR, except the rivers,’ which was often bandied about in the GDR, reflects this. ‘Silver Lake’ near Bitterfeld/Wolfen is representative of particularly drastic water pollution. The former open-cast quarry served as a wastewater pit for the Wolfen film factory, into which sludge and waste were dumped. In 1990, the layer of sludge contaminated with heavy metals was up to 12 meters thick in some places. However, it is not only industrial wastewater that contributes to water pollution, but also the generous use of fertilizers in agricultural production. Overall, many rivers and lakes in the GDR were ecologically decimated in 1990.”179

According to the report, the soil in many areas of the former GDR was also contaminated with a wide variety of pollutants, whether through intensive agriculture or factory farming or the uncontrolled dumping of toxic industrial and municipal waste in “wild” landfills.180

Elsewhere in the GDR, uranium miners in Wismut were working under conditions that were extremely hazardous to their health. In compensation, they received up to seven liters of schnapps a month. No one was allowed to mention the word “uranium,” and even the brochures used to advertise the area in and around Wismut strictly avoided the word.181 This tactic of silence was designed to prevent public fears about the health risks associated with uranium.

Data on environmental performance became classified information in the GDR on March 19, 1974 at the latest, when a ministerial decision gave Günther Mittag, Secretary of the Central Committee of the State Party SED for Economics, authority over the distribution of the GDR’s annual environmental assessments. From 1982, only he, State Council Chairman Willi Stoph, and Erich Mielke, the head of the Stasi (East Germany’s state security service) were allowed to receive the annual environmental report. Many citizens only learned the full truth about the catastrophic state of the environment in the GDR after reunification.

Here are a few facts for the purpose of comparison:

Climate threat: The historian Hubertus Knabe, a leading expert on GDR history, states: “One of the world’s biggest climate killers was, in fact, a country that had abolished capitalism—the GDR.”182 In 1989, the GDR emitted more than three times as much CO2 for each unit of GDP than the Federal Republic.183

Air pollution, sulfur dioxide: In 1988, the GDR emitted 10 times as much sulfur dioxide per km2 as the Federal Republic (48.1 tons/km2 vs. 4.6 tons/km2).184

Air pollution, airborne particles: The average load of 20.3 tons per square kilometer in the GDR was more than ten times higher than the Federal Republic (1.8 tons/km2).185

Coal-fired stoves: In private households, almost two-thirds of the apartments in the GDR were heated with solid fuels such as lignite briquettes at the time of reunification.186

Pollution of rivers: Almost half of the GDR’s major rivers were biologically dead in 1989, and 70 percent were no longer allowed to be used for drinking water.187

Nearly half of the GDR’s residents received no clean drinking water temporarily or permanently when they turned on the faucet. This was due to the high input of nitrogen, phosphorus, heavy metals and other pollutants into the waters.188

The historian Knabe states: “Like many climate activists today, the GDR’s leadership held the view that only by abolishing capitalism could environmental problems be solved. They believed that it was the greed of corporations that led to the ruthless destruction of nature. By this logic, the profit motive needed to be replaced by reason and planning for society as a whole. And, as they saw things, this is only possible under socialism.”189

Many people will concede that socialism is even worse for the environment than capitalism, but they are still left with reasonable doubts: Isn’t economic growth in general bad for the environment? There is one argument in particular that seems logical, at least at first glance: Because the earth’s raw materials are finite, infinite growth is impossible. This leads many to conclude that, somehow, growth must be curtailed.

Warnings about the limits to growth are not new; they have been around for centuries. Here are just a few examples from the last 80 years: In 1939, the U.S. Department of the Interior declared that U.S. oil reserves would last only 13 more years. In 1949, the U.S. Secretary of the Interior announced America’s oil supplies would soon run out. Having learned nothing from its earlier false claims, in 1974, the U.S. Geological Survey said that the U.S. had only 10 years of natural gas left.

In 1970, the scientist Harrison Brown published a graph in Scientific American in which he estimated that humanity would run out of copper shortly after the year 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold and silver were expected to disappear before 1990.190 Also in 1970, the ecologist Kenneth Watt predicted that the world would run out of oil: “You’ll drive up to the pump and say, ‘Fill ’er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, ‘I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’”191

Published that same year, the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth study attracted a great deal of attention. To date, more than 30 million copies of the study have been sold in 30 languages. The book warned people to change their ways and offered a stark message: the planet’s raw materials would soon be depleted, especially oil. In 20 years, the scientists predicted, the last drop of oil would be used up. And it wasn’t only in relation to oil but for almost all relevant raw materials that the Club of Rome’s report completely misjudged the date by which they would be exhausted. Natural gas, copper, lead, aluminum, tungsten: According to the predictions issued at the time, none of these natural resources would still be found in the earth today—based on forecasts for continued economic growth between the 1970s and the present day. Everything should have been used up by now; in some cases, decades ago. Silver was supposed to be depleted in 1985. In fact, in January 2020, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) estimated silver reserves worldwide at 560,000 tons.

Before anyone starts shaking their head at all these false predictions, it is worth pointing out that from the beginning of industrialization until about the 1970s, there was indeed a close correlation between economic growth on the one hand and energy and raw material consumption on the other.192

But based on numerous data series, the American scientist Andrew McAfee proves in his book More from Less, which was published in 2020, that economic growth has decoupled itself from the consumption of raw materials. Data for the U.S. show that of 72 commodities, only six have not yet reached their consumption maximum. Although the U.S. economy has grown strongly in recent years, consumption of many commodities is declining.193

As long ago as 2015, the American environmental scientist Jesse H. Ausubel confirmed in his paper “The Return of Nature: How Technology Liberates the Environment” that Americans are consuming fewer and fewer raw materials per capita. Total consumption of steel, copper, fertilizer, wood and paper, which had previously always risen in tandem with economic growth, had peaked and had been declining ever since.

Such developments are all due to the laws of much-maligned capitalism: companies are constantly looking for new ways to produce more efficiently, that is, to get by with fewer raw materials. They do this, of course, not primarily to protect the environment, but to cut costs.

What’s more, innovation has promoted a trend we call miniaturization or dematerialization. One example of this trend is the smartphone. Just consider how many devices are contained in your smartphone and how many raw materials they used to consume:

Calculator

Telephone

Video camera

Alarm clock

Voice recorder

Navigation system

Camera

MP3 player (replacing the cassette / CD player)

Compass

Answering machine

Scanner

Measuring tape

Radio

Flashlight

Calendar

Encyclopedia

Dictionary

Foreign language dictionaries

Address book

Many people today no longer have a fax or use paper road maps because they have everything at their fingertips in their smartphone, and some even do without a wristwatch. In the past, you had four separate microphones in your telephone, audio cassette recorder, Dictaphone and video camera. Today, the single microphone in your smartphone has replaced all of these devices.

I used to be proud of my large record collection, which spanned several shelves. As technology advanced, I bought CDs that all fit on a single shelf—and consumed far fewer raw materials. Today, my girlfriend teases me because I still buy CDs—all of her music is in digital files, which don’t take up any space at all. I admit I’m a bit old-fashioned and own several thousand books. I don’t have enough shelf space for them all, so most of my books are in storage. My father, despite being 93 years old, is more modern than I am and reads lots of books as e-books on his Kindle.

These are just a few of many examples of a trend toward dematerialization.194 The reality is more complex than it might seem at first glance when people say, “Our planet has limited resources, so we can’t grow indefinitely.”

So, does this all mean that the world can dispense with government regulations to protect the environment? Of course not. Even such staunch supporters of capitalism as the two Nobel Prize winners for economics Friedrich August von Hayek and Milton Friedman have always stated that the state should set the rules—the legal framework conditions—of the economic game. Hayek emphasized that free-market thinking should not be confused with a “laissez-faire” policy.195

And it was some of the most enthusiastic proponents of capitalism, who solved one of the world’s greatest ever environmental problems: the “hole in the ozone layer.” Here’s the story: In the mid-1970s, U.S. scientists Mario Molina and Sherwood Rowland warned that long-lived chemicals, such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), had the potential to destroy Earth’s protective ozone layer. And depletion of the ozone layer, they warned, would lead to a sharp increase in skin cancers and affect terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. At the time, CFCs were found in many household items, including refrigerators, deodorants and hair sprays.

In the mid-1980s, the American researcher Susan Solomon discovered that CFCs were responsible for a hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica. Then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan (a fan of Milton Friedman) and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (an admirer of Friedrich August von Hayek) took the initiative and called on the global community to work together. On September 16, 1987, more than 30 countries agreed to phase out CFCs. The resulting “Montreal Protocol” remains an outstanding example of global environmental protection and has helped to ensure that the hole in the ozone layer has become significantly smaller. Ex-UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan later described the “Montreal Protocol” as “Perhaps the single most successful international environmental agreement to date.” In one fell swoop, Reagan and Thatcher, the two arch-capitalists, thus did more to protect the environment than Greenpeace and all the other left-wing “environmental activists” ever had.

Government regulations are therefore not bad per se, but often government guidelines on environmental protection do not achieve their well-intentioned goals and instead end up doing the exact opposite. German environmental and energy policy is a case in point: Between 1957 and 2004, about 110 nuclear power stations were commissioned. In the 1970s and 1980s, the primary focus of environmentalists in Germany was to demand a phase-out of nuclear power. No issue was as important to the country’s environmental activists as the decommissioning of every single nuclear power plant.

A coalition government of Social Democrats and Greens was formed in 1998 and, two years later in 2000, regulated the end of nuclear energy for the first time in a contract between the Federal Republic and the nuclear power plant operating companies. In 2002, the German Atomic Energy Act was amended on the basis of this contract. A decision was made to extend the operating lives of nuclear power plants in 2010, but this decision was reversed in 2011 following the natural disaster at Fukushima. The last German nuclear power plant is scheduled to be decommissioned in 2022.

It was the Fukushima disaster in 2011 that prompted Angela Merkel’s government, in a lightning-swift move, to decide to shut down Germany’s nuclear power plants much earlier than originally agreed. And yet it was not the accident itself (which did not even cause Japan to turn its back on nuclear power), but the fact that there were elections in the German state of Baden-Württemberg roughly two weeks afterward that led to Angela Merkel’s swift policy shift. In the heated pre-election atmosphere, Merkel wanted to rob the Greens of one of their key election issues. But even that did not work, and the Greens attracted a record number of votes and, for the first time in German politics, a German state elected a Green politician as minister president.

One of the main reasons Germany has not made greater progress in the fight against climate change, despite its extensive efforts, is this decision to phase out nuclear power. It has resulted in the country failing to reduce its CO2 emissions by as much as it could have. In terms of environmental protection, France, for example, is in many respects no better than Germany, but while Germany has successively shut down its nuclear power plants, France’s share of nuclear power in its national energy mix is higher than any other country at about 70 percent (2019). Germany ranks 10th in the overall Environmental Protection Index 2020, while France ranks 5th. And this is mainly due to nuclear energy, because in the EPI’s separate Climate Protection Index 2020, Germany ranks just 14th, with France in 4th place.

In their 2020 EPI report, Yale researchers cautiously and diplomatically explain that “some analysts” may be of the opinion that Germany’s nuclear phase-out could harm the country’s progress in environmental performance. Less diplomatic, but more accurate, the Wall Street Journal claimed that Germany is pursuing the world’s dumbest energy policy.196

The main justification for Germany’s nuclear shut-down is the risks associated with using nuclear energy. But these risks are exaggerated beyond measure. A comparison of deaths per unit of energy generated (TWh) shows that nuclear energy kills 0.07 people, oil 18.4 and coal 24.6.197 Even hydropower is significantly more dangerous than nuclear energy. And the “kill ratio” is actually higher for wind power, photovoltaics and renewable fuels than for nuclear power.198

Bill Gates makes a strong case for nuclear power in his book on climate change, insisting that “it’s hard to foresee a future where we decarbonize our power grid affordably without using more nuclear power.”199 That’s because “Nuclear is the only carbon-free energy source we can use almost anywhere, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.”200

Opponents of nuclear power have repeatedly implied, either directly or by employing vague formulations, that 20,000 people died as a result of the reactor meltdown in Fukushima in 2011. The number 20,000 is approximately correct, but these people died as a result of an earthquake and subsequent tsunami, but by no means due to radioactivity.201

You’ll hardly ever hear about the fact that the latest generation of nuclear power plants is safer than its predecessors—most people aren’t even aware of the advances that have been made. In addition, the problems with the final disposal of radioactive waste are hugely exaggerated,202 and little publicity is given to the new reactors, which have almost entirely dispensed with this problem.203

As the climate scientist Kerry Emanuel from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge succinctly observes: “They can’t have it both ways. If they say this [climate change] is apocalyptic or it’s an unacceptable risk, and then they turn around and rule out one of the most obvious ways of avoiding it [nuclear power], they’re not only inconsistent, they’re insincere.”204

In the United States (as elsewhere), there was a long period during which no new nuclear power plants were built—but this had nothing to do with capitalism. On the contrary, the anti-capitalist movement around the U.S. lawyer Ralph Nader led a massive campaign that deliberately stoked people’s fears and led to an almost complete stop in the construction of new power plants.205 Over the last few years, discussions about nuclear power have become more objective in some countries. As a result, a growing number of environmental activists have even come out in favor of building new nuclear power plants. In California, a good 50 start-ups are currently working on the development of new nuclear technologies. Experts are already talking about “Nuclear Valley” as an offshoot of “Silicon Valley.”206 Bill Gates founded the company TerraPower in 2008 and, if it is successful, reactors could be operated with nuclear waste from other nuclear facilities.207

The example of nuclear energy shows that government intervention in the economy, even when environmental protection is given as a motive, is often not driven by rational environmental considerations but by populism and ideology. Nuclear energy is not the only example. The author Alexander Neubauer cites dozens of examples of government environmental regulations that have achieved the opposite of what was intended. Deutsches Ärzteblatt (the German medical journal) has published numerous articles reporting that the use of thermal insulation to hermetically seal homes has caused a significant increase in mold infestations in apartments, causing asthma, pneumonia and other life-threatening conditions. Some U.S. states have already banned this kind of insulation because of the associated health risks—in Germany, it is mandatory.208 This does not, however, mean that we should get rid of all government regulations for environmental protection, but it does prove that economic freedom as a whole is far better at protecting our environment than government edict.

For many so-called “climate activists,” environmentalism is little more than a pretext for their fight against capitalism. Some advocate extremely radical solutions that would in fact lead to an eco-dictatorship. They argue that when the survival of mankind is at stake, there should be no taboos. By this logic, we should entertain even the most radical solutions and dispense with values, such as freedom and democracy. When it comes to survival, the argument goes, we can’t afford the luxury of being squeamish. However, as I have shown above, planned economies have always failed, especially on the issue of environmental protection.