The Michael Moore documentary Planet of the Humans has educated millions about the dark, dirty side of so-called green energy. Producer Jeff Gibbs makes these points about wind power, solar power, and biomass in particular (verbatim):

• … there is no “green,” “sustainable” version of growth.
•  There is no technology that does not come from a profound cost to our Mother Earth.
• The mining, smelting, manufacturing, mountain dissolving, forest clearing, pit digging, air polluting, water poisoning, human exploiting, and fossil fuel burning necessary to bring us our “green” energy are no small matter.
• No “breakthroughs” in green technology will eliminate their significant and growing impact on the living planet.
• Fairy tales of green technology saving the planet protect us from the full weight of just how bad things are and from making a real plan to save ourselves and a planet worth living on. 

Land and Liberty’s Peter Sinclair openly admits when asked that they are funded by DTE Energy, Invenergy, APEX “Clean” Energy and (from memory) ESA Solar. (Correct me if I am wrong.) Two of those entities have substantial fossil fuel investments. Did Sinclair or Land and Liberty disclose that? Doesn’t that make them truly guilty of what they falsely accuse me? (Martis, below)

Climate activists and renewable-energy apologists cannot fathom their opponents are anything but shills for the fossil-fuel industry. Rather than check their premises, the modern Malthusians pretend and even distort without care.

Welcome to the ‘cancel culture’ when anything goes in the service of an agenda and emotions.

One target for the intellectually corrupt ‘renewable’ energy side is Kevon Martis, a tireless foe of government-enabled, beauty-and-wildlife desecrating industrial wind turbines and solar arrays.…

Ed. Note: Also see Part I (on wind); Part II (on water, biomass, and geothermal); and Part III (on coal) in this series.

It is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to a diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth. As a rule, new modes of economy will lead to an increase of consumption, according to a principle recognized in many parallel instances. (Jevons, below)

The long-ago insights of William Stanley Jevons profoundly inform the current debate over energy efficiency and energy-conservation policy, not just to the debate over the role of renewable energy in modern society.

Jevons’s The Coal Question (London: Macmillan and Co., 1865) made the case that renewables (windpower; waterpower, biomass, and geothermal) could not substitute for coal.…

Ed. Note: Also see Part I (on wind); Part II (on water, biomass, and geothermal); and Part IV (on energy efficiency) in this series.

Coal, in truth, stands not beside but entirely above all other commodities. It is the material energy of the country—the universal aid—the factor in everything we do. With coal almost any feat is possible or easy; without it we are thrown back into the laborious poverty of early times. (Jevons, below)

Each renewable energy, W. S. Jevons explained, was either too scarce or too unreliable to fuel the new industrial era (see previous posts on windpower and on waterpower, biomass, and geothermal).

The energy savior was coal, a concentrated, plentiful, storable, and transportable source of energy that was England’s bounty for the world.…