“In Green Party terms, acceptable energies are wind, solar, ocean, small-scale hydro, and geothermal power. Nuclear is out as much as oil, natural gas, and coal. So is ‘dirty clean energy,’ defined as ‘biomass incineration (trees, crops, construction debris and certain types of waste), landfill gas and many types of biofuels.'”

Yesterday’s post examined the Green Party’s climate platform for the 2020 election. The Green Party’s Emergency Green New Deal joins Biden’s Green New Deal and the OAC/Sanders Green New Deal, each is designed to eliminate fossil fuels and go to a new (really old) energy future.

In Green Party terms, acceptable energies are wind, solar, ocean, small-scale hydro, and geothermal power. Nuclear is out as much as oil, natural gas, and coal. So is “dirty clean energy,” defined as “biomass incineration (trees, crops, construction debris and certain types of waste), landfill gas and many types of biofuels.”…

Ed. Note: The Resolution below brings together a number of pro-consumer, pro-taxpayer, free-market groups in favor of affordable, plentiful, sustainable energies. An opening membership list is provided here.

This resolution is a statement on the relationship between energy, freedom, and human wellbeing. The members of this coalition agree: a free market is the means through which affordable, reliable energy can best enhance people’s lives, here in America and across the world.

I. Affordable, reliable energy is a vital aspect of human wellbeing, providing electricity for our factories and hospitals, heat and light for our homes and schools, and locomotion for the cars, trucks, trains, and ships that move people and goods about the planet. Affordable, reliable energy enables the modern standards of wealth and health we enjoy.

II. Energy derived from carbon-based fuels fits the affordable, reliable profile necessary for human wellbeing.…

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. 

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.…