Emmet Penney
When gas prices are sky high and the Biden administration is trumpeting unaffordable electric vehicles as the solution; when Germany continues to shutter its nuclear plants in the middle of an energy crisis; and when Sri Lanka descends into hunger, violence, and chaos because of a ban against oil-based synthetic fertilizers, it’s necessary to ask: Is the energy debate really about energy?
Forty years ago, an engineer at General Electric, Bertram Wolfe, asked the same question in the International Atomic Energy Agency Bulletin. Surveying the American scene after the energy crises of the 1970s, he noticed that the debates around energy—specifically whether to use nuclear energy, fossil fuels, and/or solar—tended to “obscure the underlying philosophical motivations which shape the arguments of the leading participants.”
Wolfe couldn’t have known it, but he had just identified what is now the dominant energy paradigm: Energy Lysenkoism.
Named after Trofim Lysenko, the Soviet scientist whose ideologically based rejection of modern genetics, fertilizers, and pesticides led to record crop failures and millions dead, Energy Lysenkoism tries, like its namesake, to enforce politics and ideology through science. Lynsenkoists distort the realities of energy to smuggle “degrowth ideology” into public policy, creating a paradigm of energy poverty that imperils the poor and working classes.
Energy Lysenkoism rests on four major pillars, three of which Wolfe identified back in the 1980s. The first is a “general distrust of a society with abundant energy supplies.” From the ’60s and ’70s up to the present, a parade of activists and elites have warned that a world with too much energy is dangerous for the planet and for humankind. We should instead adopt a romantic austerity—an “elegant frugality,” as American energy theorist Amory Lovins has put it.
This perspective works in tandem with what Alex Epstein calls the “anti-impact framework.” In short, the AIF assumes that any impact on the natural environment is too high a price to pay for an energy-infrastructure project. Therefore, it is incumbent upon us to sap the world’s energy supply, regardless of the consequences. A glance through any major news organization’s climate vertical attests to this framework’s ubiquity (though activists often drop AIF when it comes to promoting land-hungry renewables.)
Which brings us to Energy Lysenkoism’s second pillar: “that society should be forced to alter and re-orient itself to minimize energy use,” as Wolfe put it:
These first two pillars are braided together to form the third: what Wolfe characterized as “a general dissatisfaction with the present social and economic structure of society and the suggestion that energy should be used as a means for societal change not directly connected with energy.” Wolfe mentioned a solar-energy conference at which some 1,000 attendees pledged themselves to the elimination of nuclear energy, the destruction of utilities, the abolition of the oil industry, and the shrinking of “the production and distribution of energy to the lowest possible denominator—to local energy communes if possible.”
Today, author and activist Andreas Malm, who was recently celebrated in The New Yorker, advocates for the world to subject itself to an “Ecological Leninism.” This involves global veganism, total energy conversion to wind and solar, the cessation of international flights and long-distance travel and food shipping, and, somehow, open borders. Greta Thunberg basically agrees with him. For Energy Lysenkoists, energy serves as window dressing for an overarching regime change.
And it is this third pillar that gives rise to the fourth: Energy Lysenkoism’s maturation in the era of climate change. Wolfe couldn’t have anticipated the invocation of “emergency,” “crisis,” and the incantation of capital-“s” Science as a mantra to shut down democratic interrogation of green policy aims. Such sloganeering creates conditions in which anyone who questions the anti-ecopocalypse strategy of degrowth can be branded a “denialist,” irresponsibly keeping the world from converting to 100 percent renewable energy. It is in cutting off debate or discussion of alternatives that this fourth pillar truly puts the “Lysenkoism” in Energy Lysenkoism.
So, is the energy debate really about energy? Yes, but it isn’t a debate—it’s a political fight. Energy Lysenkoism obstructs any meaningful discussion about the role of energy in our society and the trade-offs we are prepared to live with. It is less about saving the environment than it is about vastly constricting human energy use. If this were circumscribed to only the chattering classes, it wouldn’t matter, but Energy Lysenkoism works to suffocate public criticism of the anti-democratic, elite-centric politics that its adherents pursue.
At the local level, it looks like Kingston, NY, where philanthropist Peter Buffett has entrenched a neo-feudal NGO fiefdom by capturing its economy and political machinery while bankrolling various degrowth intellectuals and causes.
At the state level, Energy Lysenkoism looks like California, with its fragilized grid—the result of underinvesting in reliable power plants and overinvesting in intermittent renewables. Or even like the Indian Point nuclear plant in New York state, shuttered by elite-funded groups like the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Riverkeeper, and various other green organizations working in alliance with former Gov. Andrew Cuomo. The activists promised abundant hydro-electric power from a new Quebec-sourced energy line. When Indian Point closed, the Empire State’s electricity-sector emissions rose by almost half. Some of those same groups then switched to opposing the new transmission line to Quebec Hydro, arguing it was no longer “environmentally friendly.” (Meanwhile, Buchanan, NY, the former home of Indian Point lost half of its tax base.)
At the national level, Energy Lysenkoism expresses itself in the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s push for the expansion of organized energy markets like California’s even further into the rest of the country. Why? Because it will allegedly help solve climate change by onboarding more renewables. This, despite the dangerous reliability problems that already plague these electricity markets wherever they are. Not to mention the fact that it also commits America to energy dependence on China.
Globally, Energy Lysenkoism manifests as “Environmental Social Governance” financing. ESG is a financial scheme that pressures investors and countries to divest from fossil fuel and exclusively invest in renewables. It isn’t unlike when the likes of BlackRock bully sovereign states for using cheap energy like coal—as the hedge fund has done in Indonesia, Vietnam, South Africa, and India. The ESG strategy also ignores the fact that we use crude oil for thousands of vital activities, like the creation of mRNA vaccines and single-use plastics.
It’s tempting to wish that we could pivot to a debate over the technical merits of differing energy sources. But energy cannot be divorced from politics any more than it can from economics. The classes and interest groups vying for power and influence won’t be banished from energy’s domain anytime soon. And indeed, energy and politics mustn’t be partitioned off from each other: If societies have mitigated class domination and poverty at all, it has always been thanks to energy and political force.
Before the New Deal’s Rural Electrification Act, private utilities refused to serve rural areas. But the New Deal came along and created publicly-owned electrical co-ops where there were none before. And it was elected senators, many of whom grew up in farm poverty, who brought the policy to bear. Robert Caro once described Texas farm life before electrification this way: “The one almost universal characteristic of the women was that they were worn out before their time, that they were old beyond their years, old at 40, old at 35, bent and stooped and tired.” The absence of electricity meant the absence of indoor plumbing, and the only way to get water was to manually carry loads of water, often weighing over 100 lbs., between wells, rivers, and lakes, and the home. After the REA, both freshwater and volts flowed through farms—a nearly incalculable improvement in the quality of life for farmers and their families.
It is because of energy abundance—through roads, fertilizer, electricity, plastics, and more—that our world is as radically safe and wealthy as it is. To force us to do with less is tyranny in its most basic form. In an America where some have been reduced to selling their blood plasma twice a week to overcome rising prices, it is clear that we need more, not less energy. Only a concerted political fight—not debate—over America’s energy future can get us there.
When gas prices are sky high and the Biden administration is trumpeting unaffordable electric vehicles as the solution; when Germany continues to shutter its nuclear plants in the middle of an energy crisis; and when Sri Lanka descends into hunger, violence, and chaos because of a ban against oil-based synthetic fertilizers, it’s necessary to ask: Is the energy debate really about energy?
Forty years ago, an engineer at General Electric, Bertram Wolfe, asked the same question in the International Atomic Energy Agency Bulletin. Surveying the American scene after the energy crises of the 1970s, he noticed that the debates around energy—specifically whether to use nuclear energy, fossil fuels, and/or solar—tended to “obscure the underlying philosophical motivations which shape the arguments of the leading participants.”
Wolfe couldn’t have known it, but he had just identified what is now the dominant energy paradigm: Energy Lysenkoism.
Named after Trofim Lysenko, the Soviet scientist whose ideologically based rejection of modern genetics, fertilizers, and pesticides led to record crop failures and millions dead, Energy Lysenkoism tries, like its namesake, to enforce politics and ideology through science. Lynsenkoists distort the realities of energy to smuggle “degrowth ideology” into public policy, creating a paradigm of energy poverty that imperils the poor and working classes.
Energy Lysenkoism rests on four major pillars, three of which Wolfe identified back in the 1980s. The first is a “general distrust of a society with abundant energy supplies.” From the ’60s and ’70s up to the present, a parade of activists and elites have warned that a world with too much energy is dangerous for the planet and for humankind. We should instead adopt a romantic austerity—an “elegant frugality,” as American energy theorist Amory Lovins has put it.
This perspective works in tandem with what Alex Epstein calls the “anti-impact framework.” In short, the AIF assumes that any impact on the natural environment is too high a price to pay for an energy-infrastructure project. Therefore, it is incumbent upon us to sap the world’s energy supply, regardless of the consequences. A glance through any major news organization’s climate vertical attests to this framework’s ubiquity (though activists often drop AIF when it comes to promoting land-hungry renewables.)
Which brings us to Energy Lysenkoism’s second pillar: “that society should be forced to alter and re-orient itself to minimize energy use,” as Wolfe put it:
This is, more or less, the green playbook in much of the world: choke energy consumption so that Eden may reappear. Environmentalist Bill McKibben, in his 1989 book, The End of Nature, colored the aspiration of such policies this way: “Though not in our time, and not in the time of our children, or their children, if we now, today, limited our numbers and our desires and our ambitions, perhaps nature could someday resume its independent working.”
These first two pillars are braided together to form the third: what Wolfe characterized as “a general dissatisfaction with the present social and economic structure of society and the suggestion that energy should be used as a means for societal change not directly connected with energy.” Wolfe mentioned a solar-energy conference at which some 1,000 attendees pledged themselves to the elimination of nuclear energy, the destruction of utilities, the abolition of the oil industry, and the shrinking of “the production and distribution of energy to the lowest possible denominator—to local energy communes if possible.”
Today, author and activist Andreas Malm, who was recently celebrated in The New Yorker, advocates for the world to subject itself to an “Ecological Leninism.” This involves global veganism, total energy conversion to wind and solar, the cessation of international flights and long-distance travel and food shipping, and, somehow, open borders. Greta Thunberg basically agrees with him. For Energy Lysenkoists, energy serves as window dressing for an overarching regime change.
And it is this third pillar that gives rise to the fourth: Energy Lysenkoism’s maturation in the era of climate change. Wolfe couldn’t have anticipated the invocation of “emergency,” “crisis,” and the incantation of capital-“s” Science as a mantra to shut down democratic interrogation of green policy aims. Such sloganeering creates conditions in which anyone who questions the anti-ecopocalypse strategy of degrowth can be branded a “denialist,” irresponsibly keeping the world from converting to 100 percent renewable energy. It is in cutting off debate or discussion of alternatives that this fourth pillar truly puts the “Lysenkoism” in Energy Lysenkoism.
So, is the energy debate really about energy? Yes, but it isn’t a debate—it’s a political fight. Energy Lysenkoism obstructs any meaningful discussion about the role of energy in our society and the trade-offs we are prepared to live with. It is less about saving the environment than it is about vastly constricting human energy use. If this were circumscribed to only the chattering classes, it wouldn’t matter, but Energy Lysenkoism works to suffocate public criticism of the anti-democratic, elite-centric politics that its adherents pursue.
At the local level, it looks like Kingston, NY, where philanthropist Peter Buffett has entrenched a neo-feudal NGO fiefdom by capturing its economy and political machinery while bankrolling various degrowth intellectuals and causes.
At the state level, Energy Lysenkoism looks like California, with its fragilized grid—the result of underinvesting in reliable power plants and overinvesting in intermittent renewables. Or even like the Indian Point nuclear plant in New York state, shuttered by elite-funded groups like the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Riverkeeper, and various other green organizations working in alliance with former Gov. Andrew Cuomo. The activists promised abundant hydro-electric power from a new Quebec-sourced energy line. When Indian Point closed, the Empire State’s electricity-sector emissions rose by almost half. Some of those same groups then switched to opposing the new transmission line to Quebec Hydro, arguing it was no longer “environmentally friendly.” (Meanwhile, Buchanan, NY, the former home of Indian Point lost half of its tax base.)
At the national level, Energy Lysenkoism expresses itself in the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s push for the expansion of organized energy markets like California’s even further into the rest of the country. Why? Because it will allegedly help solve climate change by onboarding more renewables. This, despite the dangerous reliability problems that already plague these electricity markets wherever they are. Not to mention the fact that it also commits America to energy dependence on China.
Globally, Energy Lysenkoism manifests as “Environmental Social Governance” financing. ESG is a financial scheme that pressures investors and countries to divest from fossil fuel and exclusively invest in renewables. It isn’t unlike when the likes of BlackRock bully sovereign states for using cheap energy like coal—as the hedge fund has done in Indonesia, Vietnam, South Africa, and India. The ESG strategy also ignores the fact that we use crude oil for thousands of vital activities, like the creation of mRNA vaccines and single-use plastics.
It’s tempting to wish that we could pivot to a debate over the technical merits of differing energy sources. But energy cannot be divorced from politics any more than it can from economics. The classes and interest groups vying for power and influence won’t be banished from energy’s domain anytime soon. And indeed, energy and politics mustn’t be partitioned off from each other: If societies have mitigated class domination and poverty at all, it has always been thanks to energy and political force.
Before the New Deal’s Rural Electrification Act, private utilities refused to serve rural areas. But the New Deal came along and created publicly-owned electrical co-ops where there were none before. And it was elected senators, many of whom grew up in farm poverty, who brought the policy to bear. Robert Caro once described Texas farm life before electrification this way: “The one almost universal characteristic of the women was that they were worn out before their time, that they were old beyond their years, old at 40, old at 35, bent and stooped and tired.” The absence of electricity meant the absence of indoor plumbing, and the only way to get water was to manually carry loads of water, often weighing over 100 lbs., between wells, rivers, and lakes, and the home. After the REA, both freshwater and volts flowed through farms—a nearly incalculable improvement in the quality of life for farmers and their families.
It is because of energy abundance—through roads, fertilizer, electricity, plastics, and more—that our world is as radically safe and wealthy as it is. To force us to do with less is tyranny in its most basic form. In an America where some have been reduced to selling their blood plasma twice a week to overcome rising prices, it is clear that we need more, not less energy. Only a concerted political fight—not debate—over America’s energy future can get us there.
