“In the shift towards environmentalism, rich people have increasingly lost track of the need to improve the standards of living of working class and poor people who do not have access to cheap, reliable and scalable power sources.”

“The communist drive to overthrow the privilege of the few resulted in extreme authoritarianism and the deaths of millions of people. Further attempts to lie about our natures and to displace our instinctive drives will result in misery.”

Part II today completes a point-by-point rebuttal of executive producer Jeff Gibbs’s defense of Michael Moore’s Planet of the Humans. Points 1–10 were covered yesterday; 11–20 follow below.

11) Fairy tales of green technology saving the planet protect us from the full weight of just how bad things are and from making a real plan to save ourselves and a planet worth living on.…

Paul Gaynor, CEO of Longroad Energy, a utility-scale wind and solar developer, recently said, “Pre-pandemic, there were great dreams and aspirations for a record-setting year.” Indeed, the renewable industry was well on its way this year to a new record: the $9 billion subsidy mark. Mr. Gaynor’s dreams and those of the industry are a burden to the rest of us.

Without the subsidies, it is almost certain [that wind and solar] would be only a niche industry, supplying perhaps a percent or two of our power, rather than the 26% it is currently supplying in Texas.

For the first time last year, electricity produced from wind in Texas almost equaled the amount produced from coal. This year, it appears as if wind is going to blow coal away.

Last year, each source produced about 20% of the electricity used on the grid.…

Fossil fuels would never brag, but they offer more versatility to create modern comforts than probably any other natural resource.

Fossil fuel [technology] … has made this quarantined Earth Day bearable.

– DEPA, “Earth Day; 50 Years of Overlooking Fossil Fuels,” April 22, 2020.

Last week, an Earth Day tribute by the Domestic Energy Producers Alliance (DEPA) went largely unnoticed. “Earth Day; 50 Years of Overlooking Fossil Fuels” noted how individuals of the upstream oil and gas industry are directly connected to the wilds of earth (and probably more so than the Washington DC staffers of the major environmental organizations who think that wind turbines and solar panels are environmentally preferable).

The piece highlighted the taken-for-granted goods and services made possible by fossil fuels.

DEPA’s 389-word tribute follows in its entirety.…

Roughly 3.3 billion people—about 45 percent of all the people on the planet—live in places where per-capita electricity consumption is less than 1,000 kilowatt-hours per year, or less than the amount used by my refrigerator.

By 2017, more than 6,600 coal-fired power plants, with a combined capacity of about 2,000 gigawatts, were operating around the globe…. Not only that, coal’s share of global electricity production has remained nearly constant, at about 40 percent, since the mid-1980s. Why is this? For the simple reason that coal is cheap and widely available.

Americans are currently facing significant uncertainty over how the drop in oil prices, the COVID-19 virus, and governments’ response to both will harm the economy and their long-term prosperity.

However, the harm caused by governments that limit access to affordable and reliable electricity is well understood.…