Barbara Ehrenreich: Did Positive Thinking Crash US Economy? Are We Playing the Same Delusional Game with Renewable Energy? You Bet We Are.

After watching this clip of Barbara Ehrenreich, my thoughts immediately turned to the nation's current infatuation with renewable energy. She is discussing the concept in her book Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America.

The idea that renewable energy and efficiency will solve our energy problems is delusional. Nuclear advocates are often accused of being "negative" or "not giving renewables a chance" when pointing out the folly of trying to run a civilization on extremely dilute sources of energy.

In the last week, a number of blog posts appeared criticizing renewable energy advocates. These are exactly the types of "positive thinking" spoilers that Barbara Ehrenreich refers to. These thinkers are giving the public the dose of reality it really needs and they won't be fired for telling it like it is.

David Bradish over at NEI exposed Amory Lovins habit of blatant cherry picking of data from reports to backup his lies.  Lovins recently argued against Stewart Brand's point that nuclear is less land intensive than wind power made in his new book. Lovins disagreed and backed up his points by a highly selective presentation of the data. Shame shame.

Barry Brook (Brave New Climate blog) absolutely destroyed the credibility of Mark Z. Jacobson and Mark A. Delucchi's paper "A Path to Sustainable Energy by 2030" along with the reputation of Scientific American for publishing this garbage with his critique. Their paper makes the outrageous claim that nuclear power emits more greenhouse gases than other energy sources on account for a probability of nuclear war and the emissions of such a war would be included in its CO2 profile.   When a "scientific" paper spins things this far, it ceases to be science and falls squarely into fantasy propaganda.

Charles Barton posted Texas Wind Rips Off Tax Payers and Rate payers, Money to flow to China at the Energy Collective.  Charles clobbered the West Texas wind farm sham by covering the problems with demand mismatch, production subsidies, and carbon offsets.  Adding insult to injury, wind proponent T. Boone Pickens is quoted as saying "I'm not going to have the windmills on my ranch. They're ugly. . . ."  from an interview with Fast Company magazine.

We have yet to see more mainstream media pick up on this positive thinking spin phenomena when it comes to renewable energy.  Let's stop kidding ourselves and get real. Barbara Ehrenreich's point should be a wake up call on this matter because we are positively creating a "green bubble" that will someday burst.