A Classic #BrightGreenLies Tactic
Conflating energy and electricity makes it easy to mislead people
This headline from Common Dreams contains a blatant lie.
The accurate headline is: "California Briefly Runs on 17.5% Renewable Energy."
Here's why.
Energy is different from electricity. Energy includes liquid and solid fuels (like gasoline, diesel, and coal) *and* electricity.
This may seem pedantic, but journalists, editors, and professors working around climate and energy must understand this. This is lazy writing.
According to the last EIA figures from California, 82% of the state's energy consumption comes in the form of coal, #fracking, oil, and nuclear power. This is why the Common Dreams headline is wrong.
This type of misleading reporting leads people to believe that we are on the way to solving the climate crisis.
That is not true.
Carbon emissions are higher than ever before, and the ecology and #biodiversity of our planet is collapsing.
The biggest drivers of ecological collapse thus far are not global warming (that will come as it gets worse), but rather habitat destruction for agriculture, urban sprawl, mining, fossil fuel drilling, etc.
And in California, one of the biggest new drivers of habitat destruction is renewable energy. For example, the state recently gave Endangered Status to the Joshua Tree — but included exemptions for solar energy projects in the Mojave which will bulldoze thousands of Joshua Trees.
These sorts of misleading headlines—and more fundamentally, the energy sprawl promoted by green tech enthusiasts—are contributing to the destruction of our planet. There are real consequences to these sorts of fairy tales (See also the pending destruction of #ThackerPass).
Further, this sort of headline is cherry-picking: taking one outlier data point and using it to make an unjustified argument.
The truth is, even if you just look at electricity, nearly 50% of California electricity comes from #fracking, and hydropower dams (aka, killing rivers) provides another 10%.
For people who don't know me: I've been raising the alarm about global warming and fighting the fossil fuel industry for more than twenty years now.
We must shut down the fossil fuel industry. We must defend what is left of our planet and restore what has been destroyed.
Peddling misleading information about renewable energy does not help the planet. It hurts the planet.
If you want to learn more about the issues with renewable energy from an environmental perspective, check out the book I co-authored, "Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It."
Hi Max. Thanks for highlighting this. I think this sort of "confusion" is probably intentional. The average person does not have the time or inclination to look at what is the true cost of renewables, so these sorts of misleading headlines are comforting to the average Joe. That's not a criticism of the average person, who are just too busy and focused on surviving week to week to look at the bigger picture and look behind the headlines. I think most "journalists" know that and can peddle whatever agenda they like without much, if any, scrutiny.
I have a request for a post if it is something interesting to others or even something you are interested in writing about. I have watched Bright Green Lies which was brilliant, a real eye-opener and depressing AF :-) My question is this: what is an individual supposed to do? I can't control the government nor big business. I can only do what I can on an individual level. So how am I supposed to live? Okay so we stop using fossil fuels - like, all of them? I understand how we used to live prior to industrial society, but we don't live like that anymore. I look around and everything is fossil fuels. How do we, on a day-to-day basis, pull back from that. So basically, are you living by example, and if so, how are you doing it? BTW I understand it is not just fossil fuels and carbon emissions as THE problem, there is much more destruction going on.