Bill McKibben Quotes
[Barack Obama] done some good things, he's done a couple of bad things. He's obsessed with this all of the above energy policy and... lots and lots of drilling in the States, so he's been weak on it.
McKibben, Bill. "Bill McKibben Webchat - As It Happened." The Guardian, Guardian News & Media, Nov. 2016.
Many environmentalists who urgently tried to reduce man’s use of fossil fuels, objected when clean energy windmills were proposed. They objected to the possible damage to flying birds and the aesthetic degradation of the landscape.
At the time this article was written coal was being phased out in most of the country but not as the result of any political actions. The new technologies of producing shale oil and fracking had driven down the price of natural gas and oil, making coal the most expensive fuel alternative so the market place was finally doing what the politicians would not do. Ironically, the conservative politicians from coal producing states like West Virginia and Kentucky, who would normally say that government should always defer to the marketplace, then called for government action to protect the coal industry from the marketplace.
Lott, like many other reasonably intelligent people who understood little about technology, did not realize that all the early efforts with a technology are relatively primitive and even the best ideas have to be engineered to scale and cost efficiency. A decade later, solar energy had become a significant industry in the work and the United States, which had invented many of the early technologies had lost the international lead in Solar Energy to Germany and China. The ultimate value of any technology cannot be judged by the initial technological efforts.
Actually, there were several purposes in the legislation creating the Department of Energy, albeit energy independence was one of the primary ones. However, the Department’s activities have been controlled by Congress and the various administrations. Neither of these two branches of our government has been willing to allow and/or require the Energy Department to do what is necessary to obtain energy independence, Each step in that direction is opposed by powerful interests and so this has been gridlocked.
William Ernest McKibben is an American environmentalist, author, and journalist who has written extensively on the impact of global warming. He is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College and leader of the climate campaign group 350.org. He has authored a dozen books about the environment, including his first, The End of Nature (1989), about climate change.
