There has been a resurgence of alarmist claims regarding the pending extinction of a majority of Earth's lifeforms due to human misdeeds—clearing rain forests, polluting the oceans and, of course, causing global warming. Perennial crank and misanthrope E. O. Wilson leads the parade of doomsayers, claiming that biodiversity is dropping and a sixth major extinction event is just around the corner. What evidence backs these claims? Why, computer model projections, naturally. The facts are researchers have identified 1.4 million animal species so far, and recently a pair of Brazilian researchers estimated that there are estimated 5.4 million yet-to-be-discovered animal species alone. The truth is, scientists have no idea how fast biodiversity is falling because they have no idea how many species there are on Earth. And the researchers put a price tag on finding out that is simply stunning.

Breakthrough Institute co-founders Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus returned to Yale University last month for a retrospective on their 2004 essay, “The Death of Environmentalism.” Rarely does a critical assessment of an inflamed public debate so clearly shine the light of reason on why a cause was lost. In their speech Shellenberger and Nordhaus, bloth life long environmentalists, argued that green politics and the climate change crisis were destroyed from within, by exaggerated scientific claims, fantasies about green jobs and “An Inconvenient Truth.” After detailing how climate change alarmists managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, the authors go on to offer some advice for the green movement: 12 theses for a post-environmental approach to climate change. In effect, they are saying that the world needs to concentrate on solving the problems that matter to people—food, energy, economic development—and the environment will be fixed as a side effect.

Green advocates and climate change alarmists alike insist that the world shift to using only non-polluting, renewable energy sources, and the sooner the better. What is seldom mentioned is the enormous cost of retooling the world's energy infrastructure to use intermittent, unreliable wind and solar energy. A recent two part paper, appearing in Energy Policy, makes a reasonable attempt at stating the requirements to fix humanity's fossil fuel addiction and go all green. The analysis found that, to provide roughly 84% of the world's energy needs in 2030, would require around 4 million 5 MW wind turbines and 90,000 300 MW solar power plants, with the remaining 16% coming from solar photovoltaic rooftop systems, geothermal, tidal, wave and hydroelectric sources. Some quick back-of-the-envelope calculations show why the world economy cannot afford to go totally green.