A huge "amen!" to Joe’s post on the mainstream media’s desperate quest to find a backlash against green energy in the wake of the economic downturn. Read it if you haven’t.
A while back, a reporter from … er, a reasonably prominent public radio show to remain unnamed gave me a call to see if I wanted to comment on the fate of climate and green energy stuff after the financial crisis.
We were chatting, doing the "pre-interview" thing where they suss out your take, and I said, basically: no. There’s no reason whatsoever to delay climate or green energy measures in the face of a financial crisis. In fact, the crisis adds urgency to the task of freeing ourselves from rising and fluctuating fossil energy costs. You might want to tweak the order and emphasis in the first few years — push efficiency first, focus on infrastructure — but the notion that hard economic times would delay these measures doesn’t make any sense to anyone who understands the situation.
That is, suffice to say, not what she wanted to hear, and I never appeared on the show. What she not-very-subtly was after was a Very Serious story about how hard times mean we have to rein in our expensive, fancy-pants, ambitious spending plans and focus on gulping down castor oil. And I’m sure that’s what she ended up with.
Meanwhile, in today’s Greenwire ($ub. req’d), we see: "Credit crunch scuttles W.Va. coal-to-liquids project."
Uh-oh! A backlash against dirty energy! Paging MSM …
