From a reader:

It’s hilarious that in your article you qualify your claims by saying “if you remove the climate change argument…” You CANNOT remove that argument from the fossil fuel debate! How can you even write an article claiming oil is “green” while ignoring its long-term effects on the environment? I realize you probably won’t read this email and if you do, you won’t care, but your arrogance and willful ignorance personally outraged me enough that I had to email you anyway. It’s also hilarious that you say renewables can’t provide us with transport when electric cars have been feasible for a hundred years– it’s only the fossil fuel lobby that keeps them from being further developed. Also, anyone who is actually advocating using biofuels made from anything other than waste materials is not environmentally conscious in any sense. And YES, we do need wind farms the size of Kazakhstan! Once the infrastructure is in place, the energy will be virtually free.
I hope you truly believe in what you say, because otherwise you are being intentionally malicious to the earth and humankind by spreading misinformation, and I like to think that most people are good at heart.
Stop pretending you know what you’re talking about for the love of god.

This woman needs to breath into a paper bag a few more times. I won’t spend a lot of time but quickly: Of course you can put aside the climate change argument — even if you believe in climate change. America could be in full compliance with Kyoto and then some, and it wouldn’t make much of a difference in the amount of CO2 pumped into the world’s atmosphere, because the rest of the world won’t be switching from fossil fuels any time soon. Meanwhile, as Bjørn Lomborg and others have long argued, there are some far more pressing environmental problems that could use the trillions of dollars that would be thrown away on slightly reducing CO2 emissions by the end of the century (and delaying computer modeled predictions of warming by a few years).

I guess Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi are environmentally unconscious since they’ve been spending so much money on corn-based ethanol.

As for the electric car being kept off the market by the fossil fuel lobby, I think the reader needs to put down the pipe.

Last, about these Kazakhstan-sized solar panels, providing “virtually free” energy, which ecosystems would the reader like to see destroyed by 1,052,085 square miles of solar gadgetry? That is ten Wyomings or four Texases or nearly two Alaskas. I suppose we should also evacuate all the humans from the Mississippi to the California border, too.

Update: From a reader:

I loved the part about the oil companies preventing electric cars. Sadly, this how these folks really think. A lefty relative is certain that the only obstacle to electric cars and windmills is some sort of vague industrial/Republican conspiracy having to do with patents of some sort. No liberal politician can even talk about it on the news, lest the lightning of conservative Thor strike them. Or something, anyhow yay team! The kicker, though, is that if you remember, the keeper of the conspiracy was always supposed to be GM. Obama owns GM now, so naturally today it was really always “the oil companies.” Tomorrow it will be the evil Easter Bunny and his secrete patent for the perpetual motion Volvo.
Have a good weekend.