Fatal Exception wrote:Why are you so against creating a better world Cal?
Regardless of whether man made climate change is real, renewable energy can only be a good thing.
Explain to me the how world's most abundant and readily-available energy sources - fossil fuels - haven't elevated mankind from his mud hut? How they haven't benefited mankind in ways too numerous to mention? How they are somehow a 'bad' thing for the very progress they have powered - and continue to power?
Windmills may have been good for grinding the corn but in the end they didn't build a modern society. It was coal that modernized farming and built empires.
There is no 'energy crisis' - there is only the wishful thinking of politically-motivated NGOs like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth who fervently pray for us all to abandon our 'wicked' fossil fuel ways and go live on a commune somewhere, no doubt worshipping Gaia three times a day.
Forcing 'renewables' on everyone will do f*ckall to protect the Earth. Quite the reverse. History shows us that forests, habitats and species the world over will remain in peril precisely because so many are denied basic rights such as cheap and reliable fossil fuels.
Fossil fuels build societies that can eventually afford to give a damn about saving the rainforests - because they don't need to clear the land any more; when that happens, when they have escaped a pitiful subsistence life of grinding poverty, perhaps then (like us) they can spend more time worrying about endangered species and precious habitats - because they'll have met their basic needs (just like you and me, with our always-on electricity and our centrally heated, double-glazed houses and our cars and all the other things that make our every-day lives - and work - so easy that we can find time (and money) to worry about all the other stuff).
There is no 'energy crisis'. There is no such thing as 'peak oil' - there never was. It was myth first put about as far back as the 50's, perhaps even sooner. When I was a boy in the early 70's all the talk was about how the oil was 'going to run out' by the year 2000. We never learn from such folly. The truth is - as vast new shale gas finds reveal - the world is abundant with fossil fuels which won't be running out any time soon.
The argument is not about using windmills and solar panels to solve a non-existent problem - no matter what 'green' alarmists would have you believe, but instead - in world rich with natural energy sources just waiting to be tapped - about how better to manage our fossil fuels to empower and elevate Least Developed Nations to a point where they, too, can afford to invest in their natural heritage and in genuine environmental protection.
