Green and mean: The downside of clean energy
21st April 2009
The problem is one of scale. Bigness is often an issue for greens, many of whom grew up reading one of the movement’s key texts: E. F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful. They liked biofuel while it was about recycling cooking fat, but not when it became growing millions of hectares of palm oil in former Borneo rainforest. Solar panels on roofs are good, but covering entire deserts with them is another matter. They like small wind turbines and even small wind farms, but get very jumpy as wind power reaches industrial scale.
Small may be beautiful, but it won’t change the world. You can’t generate vast amounts of green energy without large-scale engineering projects, which inevitably do some damage to the natural environment.
One of the nastiest things swept under the rug in recent years is the extent to which the various factions of the “progressive” coalition have incompatible interests.