Bill McKibben loves the climate. Unfortunately, he hates the environment.
For proof of that, consider McKibben’s recent cover story in The New Republic, where he asserts that the U.S. must mobilize to fight climate change with the same fervor the Allies used to defeat Hitler during World War II. After citing a few examples of recent weather events, which, in his view, prove that global warming is happening now, McKibben writes, “If Nazis were the ones threatening destruction on such a global scale today, America and its allies would already be mobilizing for a full-scale war.”
While Nazi analogies can be fun, the climate cure that McKibben, the founder of 350.org, and his friends are pushing would result in the despoliation of vast swaths of the American landscape. Indeed, it would require that an area the size of Texas and Louisiana combined be covered with hundreds of thousands of wind turbines.
The strategist behind McKibben’s climate crusade is Stanford professor Mark Jacobson, who has published papers arguing that the U.S. doesn’t need oil, coal, natural gas, or nuclear energy. According to Jacobson, the U.S. can rely solely on energy derived from wind, water, and the sun.
Jacobson has an entire claque of admirers. During his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Bernie Sanders, (I., Vt.) adopted Jacobson’s all-renewable scheme whole cloth and made it his energy plan. That move immediately won praise from the leaders of both the Sierra Club and Greenpeace USA. In addition, the recent Democratic-party platform claims that the U.S. should be running entirely on “clean” energy by 2050. Jacobson’s all-renewable dystopia is also being promoted by actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo as well as by anti-fracking activist Josh Fox. In addition, Jacobson has formed a group call the Solutions Project, which is avidly promoting his 100 percent–renewables plan.
In his essay, McKibben adheres to the liberal-left orthodoxy by completely ignoring nuclear energy’s pivotal role in cutting greenhouse-gas emissions. Instead, he praises Jacobson’s work, claiming that it “demonstrates conclusively” that the U.S. could be running solely on renewables by 2050. Achieving that, says McKibben, would need about 6,448 gigawatts of renewable generation capacity.
As usual, the devil is in the details. Jacobson’s 50-state scenario, which is available on a Stanford University website, needs about 2,500 gigawatts of wind-energy capacity and another 3,200 gigawatts or so of solar capacity. Those are staggering quantities, particularly when you consider that current U.S. generation capacity — from nuclear to geothermal — totals about 1,000 gigawatts.
