At root, environmentalism is the mechanism that allows environmentalists to pursue their fondest desire: to control everyone else’s lives. From Benjamin Zycher at realclearwire.com:
It is Earth Day 2025, the central religious holiday of the environmental left, and the theme this year is “Our Power, Our PlanetTM.” That “TM” trademark symbol is both a reality and a joke. It is a reality in that the organizers of Earth Day actually found it appropriate to trademark “Our Power, Our PlanetTM.” The joke: It is a theme supremely vacuous, reflecting the rock-bottom analytic quality of their thinking. Do they actually believe that anyone would plagiarize something so infantile?
Always determined to control the lives of billions of people around the globe — the Earth Day crowd specializes in making demands driven by endless falsehoods ¬— the central admonition this year is a tripling of global renewable electricity generation by 2030. Global renewable electricity generation in 2023 was about 9,000 terawatt-hours, an amount triple that of the 2003-2004 period. Accordingly, another tripling in less than five years is preposterous, in that the expansion of renewable electricity generation — already fantastically expensive (see below) — necessarily would take place in regions and sites increasingly unsuitable for such power production. The best sites are used first; in economic jargon, there are enormous scale diseconomies characterizing the renewables industry as it expands.
This is despite the massive subventions and favoritism bestowed upon renewable electricity — wind, solar, geothermal, hydropower, and a few others — in particular in the developed economies. It is therefore not very surprising that renewable electricity generation has grown; if we subsidize something heavily, we will get more of it.
Accordingly, the claim that renewable power is “cheap” is propaganda; if renewable electricity is so cheap, why does it need massive subsidies and guaranteed market shares and all the rest? The answer is obvious: Renewable power is not cheap, in particular when we add the cost of backup generation needed to prevent service interruptions caused by the inherent unreliability of wind and solar power.
