It's OK to Advocate for Renewables — and Against Its Enemies

I sometimes glance back through my old posts here, to try to see 2GreenEnergy as I would if I were doing so through the eyes of the typical reader who had come across us Googling “renewable energy” or some such. Reading my own stuff, I might say, “Man, that guy sure is angry. He seems to disapprove of 100 times more people and organizations than he likes. Who is he? The Simon Cowell of the energy industry?”

I often think of the editors on another popular site on clean energy who told me when we first talked, “We advocate for renewables. And we advocate against nothing.” The implication, of course, is that a business website cannot afford to make enemies. I understand that; I feel some of that pressure myself.  But if the core purpose really is moving the world to clean energy as soon as possible (i.e., before it’s too late), I see a central problem with this innocuous approach.

First, let’s acknowledge that there are some of the brightest, most well-intentioned people in the world working their very hardest to drive us in the right direction. They have my undying respect and admiration. But then let’s ask ourselves why these people have to work that hard. In particular, why are we sitting here in 2010 America watching the rest of the world running towards solar, wind, and half a dozen other technologies while the US is busy defeating the energy bill in the Senate, and refusing to create any sort of energy policy that supports the notions of national security, fiscal responsibility and sustainability?

The answer is that the clean energy industry battles huge political forces that are actively making the migration away from fossil fuels as difficult as possible, with nonstop multimillion dollar disinformation campaigns, thousands of lobbyists, and a dozen different kinds of gigantic subsidies for the oil industry (some of them carefully hidden). In the absence of these barriers, renewable energy would be perceived as the deal of century.

We at 2GreenEnergy could also “advocate against nothing.” But I’m not sure what purpose we’d be serving in the process.