Losing Faith

From this comment.

As a former renewables scientist, I must respond to this line:

“Pollution tends to become an increasing problem because the least polluting commodity sources are used first. When mitigations such as substituting renewables for fossil fuels are used, they tend to be more expensive than the products they are replacing. The leads to the higher cost of final products.”

For the record, renewables a la biofuels are NOT less polluting than petroleum. Biofuel crops are very energy intensive to produce, they require significant amounts of fertilizer and pesticide input, and the dispersed nature of crops also means significant environmental costs in the form of trucking the harvest to the plant. Once you factor in all of the costs, ethanol is barely break-even or a net cost to the environment.

After seeing this and some similar real numbers on solar, I pretty much gave up on environmentalism.

When true believers loose faith can the end be far off? Yes.

Drug Prohibition is not working any better today than it did in 1972. And yet Federal Prohibition is still with us.