Writing in today’s HuffPost, immaculate leader David Suzuki opines as follows:

As Bill McKibben points out, it didn’t have to be this way. “We could, as a civilization, have taken that dwindling supply and rising price as a signal to convert to sun, wind, and other noncarbon forms of energy,” he wrote in the New York Times Review of Books, adding that “it would have made eminent sense, most of all because it would have aided in the fight against global warming, the most difficult challenge the planet faces.”

Dwindling supply of fossil fuels? We will not even bother with that superstition. My objection is to the sheer mendacity in insisting that we can ever get off fossil fuels, at any price consistent with maintaining a civilization.

I found the first relevant graph on a left-wing site called “Our finite world”. It will suffice for my purpose.

 

 

Judging by the graph alone, if you remove the nuclear and fossil fuel portions of world energy consumption from the mix, you remove approximately  510 exajoules out of 550 exajoules per year of world energy consumption. “Biofuels” – whatever that means – constitute no more than 7% of world energy consumption.

Or try this one, from Watts up with That

Can you imagine living with 1.3% of current levels of energy?

The notion we can get off fossil fuels is one of those ridiculous ideas that does not survive 10 seconds of rational thought. Yet the policies of major governments, such as Germany and Ontario, among others, are predicated on turning to wind and solar power.