Renewable Revolution

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September 28, 2021



A key plank of climate denial has been and continues to be that climate change is just a pretense for communism, and that climate policies are an assault on capitalism. 

But two posts on Sunday show that, however unintentional, deniers agree that unchecked capitalism is getting in the way of successful climate action. 

A NoTricksZone post by P Gosselin that was reposted to WUWT describes a new documentary called Headwind“21 that exposes how renewable energy projects also have environmental impacts, and that the business behind them are, in the words of a former London banker, “all about money.” 

We’re not going to watch the entire feature-length 92 minute documentary available on YouTube, because even if it were totally 100% accurate in revealing how, as Gosselin describes, it’s all “about corporations making tonnes of money,” it wouldn’t change the fact that we need renewables to replace fossil fuels. The question is obviously how that happens, and as this doc might just show, when capitalism gets its dirty (invisible) hands on something, it doesn’t stay ethically clean for long. 

Any evidence of what a former banker called “systemic corruption” is an indictment of the capitalist system that’s corrupting the rollout of renewables, not the technologies themselves.

Speaking of corrupt capitalists, Robert Bryce published a Forbes column Sunday that also accidentally showed how capitalism is botching renewable deployment, with his list of “317 wind energy rejections the Sierra Club doesn’t want you to see.” 

As something like the evil twin of Sierra Club’s coal-plant-closing Beyond Coal strategy, the fossil fuel industry has been seeding local fights across the country to oppose wind projects, and Bryce wants you to think that these are organic grassroots uprisings that demonstrate that renewables are unpopular. 

But of course they’re not: on average 86% of Americans support funding research into renewables and 77% support expanding wind farms. Instead, the arguments from the column come straight from the fossil fuel industry. For example, the concept of wind turbine sickness, that people experience health ailments as a result of wind turbines causing shadows or air pressure changes or noise issues, has been shown to be spread not by the turbines, but by people warning about how the turbines cause health ailments. It turns out that wind turbine sickness is, per Simon Chapman’s book “a communicated disease” that people mainly catch after hearing fearmongering about from anti-wind activists like Bryce. 

And what cures it? Apparently “those paid to host turbines rarely complain” so Chapman suggests that “the drug ‘money’ may be a powerful preventive.”

Snark aside, the fact is that when impacted communities are brought into an energy project from the start and communities and experts are consulted from the planning stage through the life of the project, and are literally bought into the plan through socialized profits, it’s a lot less likely that any opposition will be successful in stopping it, because it will have already met their (environmental, etc) standards and provided a tangible financial benefit to the community. 

As the energy transition requires a renewable buildout of incredible scale, putting it solely in the hands of the capitalists whose profits-over-public-good approach is what caused climate change in the first place would mean cheap products, hastily installed, and locally opposed for legitimate reasons.

It’s a recipe for disaster. 


Plus, irony levels would be off the charts if after having opposed climate action because of socialism,  the only criticism about renewables deniers get right is because they’re actually criticising capitalism, and the so-called climate alarmists supposedly pushing for global communism actually end up facilitating a massive capitalist (clean) power generation power grab.