How Green Is Their Energy?

Take a big deep breath, Bob Brown—savour the seventy-eight parts of nitrogen, twenty-one of oxygen, and the smidgen of carbon dioxide—and contemplate the folly of your alternative-energy ideas. Renewables are not green. That’s the view of one of the pioneers of climate science politics. Jesse Ausubel, Senior Research Associate in the Rockefeller University’s Program for the Human Environment, helped organise the first UN World Climate Conference in Geneva in 1979. He is an avowed “deep green” scientist who believes the essence of being green, and therefore his mantra, is no-new-structures. For years he has been arguing heretical views on energy. In the wake of the Productivity Commission’s scathing comments on renewables, now is the time to listen to him.

Ausubel has a list of heresies that might horrify the true believers in wind and solar power, electric cars and distorting government subsidies: 

• Renewables are not green.
   
• The idea of resource exhaustion is…