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I actually argue that renewables are worse than fossil fuels. It's a physical manifestation of lower power densities. More land, more materials, more mining, more metals, more waste.
What we need to talk about is what we want America to look like: what a sustainable, economically prosperous America looks like in the 21st century, and what we need to do to get there.
Renewables require the use of vastly more land, longer and less-utilized transmission lines, and large amounts of storage whether from lithium batteries, new dams, compressed air caverns.
If you care about the environment, you want food and energy production to become more efficient and centralized. You want to put less inputs in and get more outputs out and get less waste.
Journalists and activists alike have an obligation to describe environmental problems honestly and accurately, even if they fear doing so will reduce their news value or salience with the public.
Solar and wind advocates say cheaper solar panels and wind turbines will make the future growth in renewables cheaper than past growth but there are reasons to believe the opposite will be the case.
It was only with the rise of capitalism and the need for workers to be freer, more mobile, and prosperous, that societies were able to undermine pagan morality and the ancient institution of slavery.
Wind energy threatens golden eagles, bald eagles, burrowing owls, red-tailed hawks, Swainson's hawks, American kestrels, white-tailed kites, peregrine falcons, and prairie falcons, among many others.
Now that Europe has developed through deforestation and fossil fuel use it is telling Brazil not to develop through deforestation and fossil fuel use. Bolsonaro is the backlash against such hypocrisy.
In reality, Chernobyl proves why nuclear is the safest way to make electricity. In the worst nuclear power accidents, relatively small amounts of particulate matter escape, harming only a handful of people.
Celebrities, whether from the world of entertainment or politics, moralize about the need to change individual consumption when they should be moralizing about the need to change collective energy production.
All renewables thus require a material throughput - from mining to processing to installing to disposing of the materials later as waste - that is orders of magnitude larger than for non-renewable energy sources.
Why are the people who are most alarmist about climate change so opposed to the technologies that are solving it? One possibility is that they truly believe nuclear and natural gas are as dangerous as climate change.
Allowing for suburbanization of California's ranches and farmlands would still allow for strong protections of California's truly natural areas like Yosemite, the redwoods, and oak woodlands and green spaces near cities.
The value of solar and wind decline in economic value as they become larger shares of the electricity grid for physical reasons. They produce too much energy when societies don't need it and not enough energy when they do.
If you look at all the energy that is used by an iPhone, not just to make it and to power it, but also to power all the servers, all of the stuff that you don't see that the iPhone is connected to, it uses as much energy as a refrigerator.
Humankind has never transitioned to energy sources that are more costly, less reliable, and have a larger environmental footprint than the incumbent - and yet that's precisely what adding large amounts of solar and wind to the grid requires.
Chernobyl' is supposedly about the lies, arrogance, and suppression of criticism under Communism, but the mini-series portrays life in the Soviet Union in the 1980s as inaccurately, and melodramatically, as it portrays the effects of radiation.
Normally skeptical journalists routinely give renewables a pass. The reason isn't because they don't know how to report critically on energy - they do regularly when it comes to non-renewable energy sources - but rather because they don't want to.
I believe Forbes is an important outlet for broadening environmental journalism beyond the overwhelmingly alarmist approach taken by most reporters, and look forward to contributing heterodoxical pieces on energy and the environment in the future.
We have good examples of successful adaptation to rising sea levels. The Netherlands became a wealthy nation despite having one-third of its landmass below sea level, including areas a full 7m below sea level, as a result of the gradual sinking of its landscapes.
Nuclear is the only energy source that has proven capable of fully replacing fossil fuels at low-cost in wealthy nations. While hydro-electric dams can sometimes play that role, they are limited to nations with powerful rivers, many of which have already been dammed.
Before progressives were apocalyptic about climate change they were apocalyptic about nuclear energy. Then, after the Cold War ended, and the threat of nuclear war declined radically, they found a new vehicle for their secular apocalypse in the form of climate change.
The rapidly spinning blades of wind turbines act like an apex predator that big birds never evolved to deal with. And because big birds have much lower reproductive rates than small birds, their deaths have a far greater impact on the overall population of the species.
Sunlight and wind are inherently unreliable and energy-dilute. As such, adding solar panels and wind turbines to the grid in large quantities increases the cost of generating electricity, locks in fossil fuels, and increases the environmental footprint of energy production.
There is good evidence that the catastrophist framing of climate change is self-defeating because it alienates and polarizes many people. And exaggerating climate change risks distracting us from other important issues including ones we might have more near-term control over.
Dealing with environmental lawsuits and grassroots resistance is expensive. Industrial wind and solar developers have to hire lawyers, public relations specialists, and scientists willing to testify that this or that project poses only a modest threat to endangered birds and bats.
We should be concerned about the impact of climate change on vulnerable populations, without question. There is nothing automatic about adaptation. But it's clear that there is simply no science that supports claims that rising sea levels threaten civilization much less the apocalypse.
I became an environmentalist at 16 when I threw a fundraiser for Rainforest Action Network. At 27 I helped save the last unprotected ancient redwoods in California. In my 30s I advocated renewables and successfully helped persuade the Obama administration to invest $90 billion into them.
Trump gives progressives a way to channel whatever guilt they might have - whether from preventing homebuilding, benefitting from unfair taxes and pensions, or depriving black and Latino students the teacher quality and school funding they need - into a sanctimonious tribal rage against Republican racism.
Solar makes electricity expensive for two inherently physical reasons. Sunlight is dilute, requiring 10 to 15 times as much materials and mining, and up to 5,000 times more land, than non-renewables. And sunlight is unreliable, which reduces the value of solar as it becomes a larger part of energy supplies.
At 17, I lived in Nicaragua to show solidarity with the Sandinista socialist revolution. At 23 I raised money for Guatemalan women's cooperatives. In my early 20s I lived in the semi-Amazon doing research with small farmers fighting land invasions. At 26 I helped expose poor conditions at Nike factories in Asia.
Nations are reorienting toward the national interest and away from Malthusianism and neoliberalism, which is good for nuclear and bad for renewables. The evidence is overwhelming that our high-energy civilization is better for people and nature than the low-energy civilization that climate alarmists would return us to.
I remained quiet about the climate disinformation campaign because I was afraid of losing friends and funding. The few times I summoned the courage to defend climate science from those who misrepresent it I suffered harsh consequences. And so I mostly stood by and did next to nothing as my fellow environmentalists terrified the public.
YIMBYs should embrace a housing reform agenda broader than increasing urban density. This should start with ending tax shelters in the form of land conservation easements to cattle ranches and farms that abut suburbs. This would create an incentive for landowners convert them either to new housing subdivisions or to genuinely new natural areas.
Hydroelectric dams remain the way many poor countries gain access to reliable electricity, and both solar and wind might be worthwhile in some circumstances. But there is nothing in either their history or their physical attributes that suggests solar and wind in particular could or should be the centerpiece of efforts to deal with climate change.