Editor Note: This post is part of the three-part series with Part I yesterday on Biofuels and Solar and Part III tomorrow on The Big Picture.

“Environmentalists are focused on banning plastic straws! Their inability to differentiate between imaginary, wildly inflated ecological problems and not the here-and-now issues of renewable energies is what the UN powers should address–but will not.”

Mandated, subsidized wind energy requires millions of acres for turbines and ultra-long transmission lines, plus billions of tons of concrete, steel, copper, rare earth metals and fiberglass. The turbines produce intermittent, unreliable electricity that (absent subsidies) costs much more than coal or gas-fueled electricity – and must be backed by fossil fuel generators that must go from standby to full-power many times a day, very inefficiently, every time the wind stops blowing.…

“United Nations conference organizers could have invited free market-oriented experts to offer thought-provoking, evidence-based analyses and critiques of UN precepts that are under fierce attack economically and politically. But they invited no such experts…. This intellectual void prompted the Heartland Institute to organize a separate event.”

“Eliminating fossil fuels means the world would also have to replace the oil and natural gas feedstocks for pharmaceuticals, wind turbine blades, solar panel films, paints, synthetic fibers, fertilizers … and plastics for cell phones, computers, eyeglasses, car bodies and countless other products. Including those needs, the required land would roughly require two India’s of land for biofuel plantations.”

They could have had a global teleconference to save millions of dollars and millions of gallons of aviation and vehicle fuel. They could have set a good example and avoided massive carbon dioxide emissions.…