Environmentalism's Big Lie: Renewable Energy by Jack Wakeland

This is an excerpt from a great article by Jack Wakeland for The Intellectual Activist.

Many environmentalists claim that putting the earth first only requires man to switch his power source from one technology to another; that the only thing their ideology requires is that the production of man-made power not deplete the earth's "limited" resources.

According to John Berger, a leading advocate of "alternative" technologies, renewable energy is in "harmony" with nature because it "draws on the perpetual flow of energy income to the Earth and doesn't deplete the Earth's energy capital. It doesn't destroy the earth in the process of providing us with the ability to do work." The only reason why "non-sustainable" fossil fuels have been favored over renewable energy, according to Berger, is that free markets cause us to "make our long-term energy decisions on the basis of short-term price signals."

In reality, these claims that renewable energy can replace fossil fuels and nuclear power are a fraud. In California, moreover, environmentalists have revealed that their real attitude toward renewable energy is no less hostile than their attitude toward all other forms of man-made power. After the installation of hundreds of "alternative" energy plants in the state—in the nation's most ambitious program to build environmentally correct power plants—the greens have begun to reject one renewable power technology after another.

Amory Lovins, a MacArthur fellow who has written 27 books, is the originator of environmentalism's renewable energy campaign. Lovins has promoted the view that all large-scale electricity production facilities must be phased out before they destroy the earth with pollution, radioactive waste, and supposedly climate-changing carbon dioxide.

To save the earth, Lovins claims, the entire American power grid with its 745,000 MW of central station generating capacity must be replaced with decentralized and distributed electrical generation. He envisions photovoltaic cells on every rooftop, windmills in every backyard, hydrogen-fuel-cell-powered automobiles in every garage, bio-mass generators in every barn, and ethanol crops in every field. As a "bridge" to this environmentally correct energy regime, Lovins advocates the use of natural-gas-fired power plants and co-generators, plants that use much of the low temperature heat normally rejected from conventional power plants to produce steam for heating and for certain industrial processes.

The productivity claims Lovins makes for renewable energy range from the improbable, to the extravagant, to the impossible.

For the full article click here.