Green groups campaigned heavily in May to keep oil in the ground, yet their anti-fossil fuel crusades are now met with yawns from other environmentalists who believe renewable energy is an ineffective alternative for fossil fuels.
The “Keep It In The Ground” groups embarked on a two-week long Break Free 2016 rally in hopes of convincing the U.S. and the world to permanently stop using oil and coal. Environmentalists like Bill McKibben, among others, called the rally the “greatest civil disobedience for climate action in history,” and others said more than 30,000 protesters would take part in events in far flung-places like the Philippines.
Kathleen Hartnett-White, the director of the Armstrong Center for Energy & the Environment at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, told The Daily Caller News Foundation she thinks many green activists, as well as institutions such as Stanford University, are realizing renewable energy alone cannot fill the void left by jettisoned fossil fuels.
“The decarbonizing folks,” White said, referring to them as the true ideologues within the environmentalist community, “want a complete break from fossil fuels,” while other green types say “complete fossil fuel divestment is a pipe dream.”
White’s comments are not without precedent. A cavalcade of liberal voices and green activists have called an all-out ban on fossil fuels a naïve mission.
Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, a Democrat, said during a panel discussion in April that anti-fossil fuel activists and “Keep It In The Ground” types are a “small minority” and “not an accurate representation of the people of Colorado.” Hickenlooper warned “we’re a long way from saying we can walk away from hydrocarbons and not do significant damage to our economy.”Former NASA climate Scientist James Hansen, often considered the godfather of global warming, said in a 2013 interview “that renewables will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels in the United States, China, India, or the world as a whole is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy.”
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