Once you come to terms with death, anything is possible

From New Michael Moore-Backed Documentary On YouTube Reveals Massive Ecological Impacts Of Renewables by Michael Shellenberger.

Roger Moore has always struck me as a very particular voice. He is often abrasive, strident in his opinions, revolting in some of his attitudes, etc. but he has seemed to have had some consistency absent among others. He has also struck me much more as a man of the old fashioned labor left (a la the UK of three or four decades ago) than a virtue-signaling champaign liberal. Indeed, I suspect he has about as much disregard for the champagne liberals of the world as he did for Roger Smith.

So I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that it is Moore who has produced a, presumably, hard-hitting documentary that punctures the plethora of environmental myths so beloved of the virtue-signaling Mandarin Class.

Rational, empirical environmentalists have for three or four decades looked on while feel-good virtue signalers hijacked the movement to make it more of a religion or cult. Bjørn Lomborg first brought this to broader public attention with The Skeptical Environmentalist in 1998. Much of what is presented as responsible environmentalism today is at best kabuki theater and at worst, immensely damaging of the environment, immiserating lives of poor people, and destructive of the environmental movement.

Rational, empirical environmentalism is one thing. Anthropogenic global warming, clean energy, peak oil, renewables, banning plastic bags and straws - most of that is emotional, cultish, religious, pseudo-science. We need more of the former; most of what have is the latter.

Shellenberger indicates that Moore is ruthless in his debunking. I hope so. Calm recitation of facts, arguments, data, is demonstrably ineffective when dealing with the self-serving cultists.

Solar panels require sixteen times more materials in the form of cement, glass, concrete, and steel than do nuclear plants, and create three hundred times more waste. “You would have been better off just burning fossil fuels in the first place,” said one expert, “instead of just playing pretend. We’re basically just being fed a lie.”

The man noted that Koch Industries provide many of the materials used to build solar panels and industrial solar farms. “The funny part is that when you criticize solar plants like this you are accused of working for the Koch brothers,” he laughs. “That’s the idiocy. This relies on the most toxic industrial processes we’ve ever created.”

What drives people who believe they want to save the environment into destroying it? The filmmaker hints that the desire for “sustainability” is really a desire for a kind of immortality. “What differentiates people is that we know we’ll die someday,” says a sociologist. “We enveloped ourselves in belief systems and worldviews.”

“People on the left and the right who think we’re going to be able to solar panel ourselves into the future,” he says, “I think that’s delusional.”

The good news, the man says, is that “once you come to terms with death, anything is possible.”

Rereading the article, I better see an old Moore leitmotif. He really despises the establishment Mandarin Class, left or right, for their willingness to self-enrich and self-indulge themselves at the expense of the working poor.

Don't have much in common with Moore, but I think we share that sentiment.