Luddites masquerading as environmentalists

This makes me so mad because everyone wants to be a good steward of the environment so its really easy to sell folks on the luddite nonsense.    Folks would never agree to go back a century to unreliable windmills if the concept was presented directly.   But stir up fears of 'NUCLEAR EXPLOSION will cause MASS DEATHS and then give everyone for hundreds of miles around CANCER'  with nuclear power to take it off the table.  Done.

Oops those darned pesky petroleum and mining engineers are providing enough coal, oil and gas to make energy cheap anyway, now what can we do -- oh hey lets stir up fears of CAGW.    As an engineer/scientist the C and A are important to me.   No one with real knowledge and sense denies there is global warming.   There is plenty of  question about the percentage of warming caused by human activity and there is very good reason to be very skeptical indeed that there will be catastrophic runaway warming.   If the earth's system tipped into runaway warming so easily we should have had runaway warming when the medieval warm period happened and more water vapor evaporated from the oceans a 1000 years ago, except we should have had the catastrophe 2000 odd years ago during the Roman warm period and never even made it to the medieval warm period.  

But the Luddites simply don't like everyday folks having access to cheap power and all the liberties and yes also complications that brings.   Now I will grant those Luddites that the complications can become overwhelming for some folks at some times.    But they know darn well the public is not going to buy into any arguments based on "look it is not good for you to be able to have a plasma TV,  AC,  microwave, computer/web access etc etc"  so they have to resort to stirring up fears of the good power sources to try to convince people to switch to "safer --  HA"  power sources that just happen to be a lot more costly and a lot less reliable.

Knowing what I know now I would wager my life savings that if someone suddenly invented a really good way to store power from wind and solar 90% of the "environmentalists" would all of a sudden *realize* that "Oh dear these big wind turbines sure do kill a lot of birds and the mining for materials and the manufacturing of those solar cells and wind towers sure is hard on the environment so we have GOT to cut way down on these harmful things"   Effing scumbags.