If climate change is a problem, then wind turbines and solar panels aren’t a solution: heavily subsidised and unreliable wind and solar are an economic and environmental disaster.
When climate alarmists managed to hijack energy (and with it economic) policy it was a case of lunatics taking over the asylum. In every breath they exhort us that immediate action must be taken to prevent runaway climate change. Where “action” means – and only ever means – more (indeed endless) subsidies for wind turbines and solar panels to generate chaotically intermittent electricity at exorbitant cost.
In the veritable blink of an eye, hysterical claims about cataclysmic global warming and imminent catastrophe managed to capture the imagination of the anxious, fretful and foolish. Sadly, while a few sought to throw a bucket on the more ludicrous claims made by furtive doomsdayers, plenty of otherwise sensible characters went along with the herd.
STT has given a fair bit of coverage to Michael Moore’s Planet of the Humans. Which was the first solid example of members of the hard-green-left seeking to distance themselves from the greatest economic and environmental fraud of all time.
For some, however, it wasn’t just the fact that renewable energy rent seekers were making untold $millions cashing in on the state sanctioned scam that they helped to create, it was the fact that climate alarmism quickly morphed into a pervasive evil, designed to strike an immobilising sense of fear in the youngest members of society. Greta Thunberg was probably the natural result of a generation terrorised by increasingly persistent and outlandish claims that the end is nigh, all thanks to carbon dioxide gas.
Last week, Michael Shellenberger hit the headlines with a heart-felt mea culpa, the foundation for which is laid out in his latest work, ‘Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All’.
At 459 pages it’s a thoroughly researched piece of academic work that can’t be easily dismissed or ignored; as a grand and exhaustive effort to expose the fanciful and far-fetched claims being made about a planet on the brink it’s had a perfectly predictable result. Those profiting from industrial-scale climate fear-mongering are apoplectic, screaming “heretic” and “denier”; as if that might somehow undermine Shellenberger’s message and the facts he marshals in support.
Among renewable energy rent seekers, Shellenberger was already a target for their self-interested form of vitriol as an advocate for reliable, affordable and safe nuclear energy, and for calling wind and solar worse than useless. For that reason, Michael has graced these pages on numerous occasions.
With Michael Moore’s attack on renewable energy rent seekers – like Bill McKibben and Al Gore – and Michael’s about-face on imminent climate Armageddon, the adage about the madness of crowds, springs to mind. That’s the one about how people go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.
Michael Shellenberger proves that he has most certainly recovered his senses, as detailed in the piece he penned for The Australian.
Sorry, but I cried wolf on climate change
The Australian
Michael Shellenberger
2 July 2020
The Australian
Michael Shellenberger
2 July 2020
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