Michael Shellenberger is a pretty well known name to us on the Hard Right by this point. He was, and in many ways remains, your typical Leftist Greenie – which is to say, he was a watermelon. Green on the outside, blood-red on the inside. He has been involved in environmental activism for pretty much his entire life.

And now he stands with Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, as one of the greatest heretics in the history of the environmentalist movement.

Earlier this year, he published a book that basically renounced and contradicted a large number of Greenie shibboleths. The most important of these is the notion that you can solve the world’s energy needs through wind and solar power. He even went and made a video on the subject for the Neo-Palestinians over at Prager U:

Now before any of us get too excited, it’s worth remembering the wise words of our friend and elder learned brother, Adam Piggott, the Gentleman Adventurer, who pointed out that if this guy was for real, he would give back all of the money that he made while preaching the Green Gospel:

Michael Shellenberger wants us to buy his book to find out all the ways that he lied and conned the public while stealing taxpayer funds to continue his parasitic lifestyle. Far from confessing himself via a book, he should be made to give penance by repaying all of the monies that he fraudulently gained. His written words mean nothing. We already know the lies; a good many good and honest people have worked tirelessly to expose them. What counts now are actions.

So pay back all of the money, Michael. And then you can do something really useful, like fuck off and die.

We will never forget, nor forgive. You are tarred.

While I am not quite that strident, and I’m happy to see that another Leftist useful idiot has woken up and smelled the coffee, the damage done by overanxious idiots to public perception and policy is immense. Adam is right – we can trust Mr. Shellenberger only when he pays back all of the money that he made during his time in the Green Machine scamming people.

Michael Shellenberger was, and in a lot of ways probably is, part of that same crowd that came up with hugely expensive “green” boondoggles that are anything but environmentally friendly and end up devastating the environments around them.

Still and all, it appears that the wind really is being knocked out of the Green movement’s sails right now, and that is a VERY Good Thing. Michael Moore’s recent activist-documentary film, Planet of the Humans, stirred up an absolute hornet’s nest of Greenie anger after Mr. Moore turned several of their most important sacred cows into cheeseburgers:

The fact is, and always was, that the environmental movement is a scam. There is simply no way to get rid of fossil fuels. Our entire modern way of life depends completely upon crude oil and natural gas.

I’m not just talking about energy. That is the most important benefit of fossil fuels, certainly. The sheer number of fuel products alone that come from fossil fuels is staggering – and the “cracking” and distillation process generates so much additional material that can be used for other industrial applications that the list is practically beyond count and human understanding.

Organochemistry is a subject that most schoolchildren have a tough time understanding, because it is complicated and difficult. Weirdly enough, I always found organic chemistry to be considerably easier to figure out than regular chemistry. I have no idea why – I think that organic chemistry requires a much stronger understanding of mathematical and spatial relationships than the broader version, but that’s just my opinion and in this case that’s probably as useful as an asshole. All I can say is that I still remember, to this very day, nearly 20 years later, the lessons in organic chemistry that I learned in school which taught us how much benefit we get from crude oil products.

The sheer amount of stuff that we can make using fossil fuels is simply unbelievable, as the list above points out. Look around you, right now, wherever you are sitting. Your computer, your smartphone, your sofa, your house, your furniture, your television, your clothes, your pen, and a literally ENDLESS number of other products within your vicinity were manufactured using fossil fuels.

Now look at the food in your fridge. Every single thing in that refrigerator was cultivated and harvested using fossil fuel products of some kind – including the fertilisers and pesticides.

Now imagine losing ALL of those products. Imagine EVERY SINGLE THING AROUND YOU simply vanishing. That includes the clothes on your body and practically every single plastic item of any kind, since most of those plastics are derived from hydrocarbon chains, and those hydrocarbon chains are derived from – you guessed it! – fossil fuels.

Would you be able to survive without these things?

If you were really honest with yourself, you would admit immediately that you’d be dead within a week, most likely less.

And that is the reality of the Green movement. They are not honest. They are absolute liars on every level.

The fact is that switching back to an economy without fossil fuels would be absolutely devastating – I’m talking in Apocalyptic terms. Let’s try to imagine it for a moment.

Human populations would shrink by about 90% to go back to a pre-industrial level of existence, and that’s not an exaggeration. BILLIONS would freeze and burn and starve to death within three months. Billions more would die from disease because the facilities needed to treat them need fossil fuels just to exist.

There is simply no form of electricity that is cheap enough to compete with coal – everything else has an extremely high set of built-in costs. So without coal we’d be stuck, for all intents and purposes, with wooden windmills and dams – since we can’t use any of those icky horrible plastics and refined products that make modern existence possible.

But then, even if we could figure out a way to generate electricity using wood and iron and metal – which we can, actually, the technology dates back to the early Industrial Revolution – we’d still have to figure out a way to store and transmit it. And there we run into another huge problem. We can’t do that without industrial chemicals and materials derived at least in part from fossil fuels.

On top of this, let’s not forget that in order to light and heat our homes, we’d need sources of fuel. Outside of fossil fuels, the only other available sources are all organic – basically, wood, dung (i.e. animal shit), and biologically derived oils.

This means, in practical terms, denuding pristine forests and wiping out millions of square kilometres of trees, just to keep people alive. That would devastate our environments, cause soil erosion on an epic scale, and wipe out untold billions of creatures ranging from insects to birds to reptiles to mammals. And that’s before we get to the whole, y’know, humans starving to death because they have no fertile land anymore thing.

It would lead to mass extinctions of numerous species that have made a significant comeback thanks to fossil fuels.

Have any of you ever been whale-watching? Ever watched sperm whales doing that majestic breaching thing as part of their mating rituals? It’s quite a magnificent sight, is it not?

Do you know why those whales are still alive today?

Because of fossil fuels – specifically, crude oil.

The oil in their craniums – derived from spermaceti – was used to light lamps along streets and outside of rich households in the pre-Industrial age. It was difficult, dangerous, and expensive to acquire – go read Moby Dick by Herman Melville to get an idea of just how dangerous it was. And when refined petroleum products like kerosene, diesel, and gasoline came along, which were VASTLY cheaper to manufacture and store and process and move, the need for hunting sperm whales evaporated overnight.

That’s right. You can thank the evil, horrible, terrible, dreadful, awful, icky, nasty, no good, very bad John D. Rockefeller and the old Standard Oil Corporation for saving the whales. In fact, you can thank Big Oil for the very existence of clean air, water, and countrysides today, because the very same oil tycoons who made their fortunes out of black gold, were constantly under massive market and consumer pressure to deliver cheaper, cleaner, better products.

It turns out that the old “robber barons” were actually, on the whole, hugely beneficial to America and Western civilisation. Our modern, highly advanced standard of living simply could not exist without those men.

Irony’s a bitch, ain’t she?

And I’m not just writing all of this because I happen to own shares in ExxonMobil, either. I’m writing all of this because it’s true.

Now, when presented with this incontrovertible evidence about the benefits of fossil fuels – and it is incontrovertible – the average Greenie either shouts you down or breaks into a cold sweat and claims that xhe doesn’t really want to eliminate ALL fossil fuel usage. After all, where would zhe get xis Macbook and iPhone and soy latte from? (Soybeans are extremely cheap and easy to cultivate thanks to fossil fuel-derived fertilisers, pesticides, and petroleum products, by the way, especially when you combine all of that with modern bio-engineering and genetic modification.)

That’s when Mr. Neckbeard Soyboy tries desperately to change the subject and claim that the entire Western economy could be powered by wind and solar energy.

Nope. Sorry, Sparky, wrong again.

These forms of energy are extremely high-cost and energy-inefficient. They are not reliable. You can try to store the power generated from these sources in big batteries and capacitors, and that does work – but then you have to transport it, and that is really hard to do. There is always a massive amount of energy lost in the transportation process between points, even with the latest superconducting materials used in the transmission wires (also a product of modern hydrocarbon-based chemistry, by the way).

And that is before we get to the environmental impact of things like “green” energy like wind, solar, and hydroelectric power.

The classic example of hydroelectric mismanagement in the USA is the Tennessee Valley Authority and their chronic bungling of power generation for the rural Appalachian populations. Hydroelectric power seems like a great idea every time it’s proposed – until you remember that it has significant environmental impacts that you simply cannot ignore. That was the case with the Hoover Dam, that was certainly the case with China’s gigantic (and possibly failing) Three Gorges Dam, and that has always been the case with damming up a river to generate power. It’s not nearly as easy or cheap as people think.

I could rabbit on about this subject for a good long while yet, but I’ll leave that to the actual rabbits in the environmental movement. Just remember, no matter what the source is, power never comes for free. There are always costs involved, and if anyone from the Green Lobby ever tries to pull the wool over your eyes about this, then simply call him a liar and refuse to have anything to do with him. These people cannot be redeemed by outside help. They will simply have to learn from their own colossal failures and mistakes.

Unfortunately, in the process of learning from their own stupidity, the rest of us tend to pay a very high price – quite literally, in the case of the Germans and Australians now dealing with “energy poverty” thanks to government-mandated usage of “green” energy – for their mistakes.