Confessions of an Environmentalist
Imagine you dedicated your life to environmentalism and all of its assumptions. Then imagine you realize those assumptions are all wrong. What would you do? Entrepreneur Brian Gitt tells his personal story and where it led him.
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Script:
Just because you feel like you’re doing the right thing doesn’t mean you are. I have dedicated most of my life to protecting the environment. But I went about it the wrong way. I thought I was acting morally, protecting the well-being of people and the planet. In fact, I was harming both.
I believed solar and wind power were the future—our only hope of avoiding environmental catastrophe. Fossil fuels were the enemy, extracted from the earth by greedy companies plundering the land, polluting the air, and destroying ecosystems.
Keeping the wilderness as pristine as possible was my passion.
Ever since I was a teenager, I loved the outdoors. I led mountaineering expeditions in Alaska, spent months backpacking in the Rockies, and climbed the highest peaks in national parks. I only took jobs that I thought would protect the environment.
I started a company that built composting systems for cities and businesses.
I served as executive director of an organization that championed green construction policies.
And then I became CEO of a consulting firm that worked on making homes more energy efficient.
At that time, the Obama administration had earmarked billions of dollars in federal funding to create jobs in the energy sector, and my company won multi-year contracts valued at over $60 million.
I thought I was making a real difference in the world. I was surrounded by smart, successful, ambitious people who shared my beliefs and my heartfelt desire to change things. And my company had lots of money and lots of government support.
There was only one problem: our project to build more energy-efficient homes was an utter failure.
Making home energy improvements was much too expensive for middle-class families—even with generous government subsidies. Wealthy families, by contrast, loved the program. They got subsidies they didn’t need and the environmental cred they craved. In reality, though, we weren’t achieving much of anything—except wasting taxpayer money.
That’s not how the government saw it. The government celebrated the project as a big win.
It was a great photo op for politicians. But I knew the program didn’t deliver the jobs and energy savings we had promised.
Maybe I should have accepted the props and kept doing what I was doing.
But I couldn’t.
I began re-examining everything I had believed about energy and the environment.
It didn’t take me long to realize that I had been living in a fantasy world: perfectly fine for making me feel good about myself and my mission, but perfectly useless for making real environmental change.
The more research I did, the more I realized that my project was just a symptom of a much bigger problem.
We’re wasting trillions of dollars on the false hope that wind and solar power are going to replace fossil fuels—oil, coal, and natural gas. Yet over the last 20 years, the world’s dependence on these fuels has declined by only three percentage points—from 87% to 84%.
That’s a pathetic return on our “investment.”
If we’re serious about confronting climate change, protecting the environment, and helping people climb out of energy poverty around the world, we need to stop chasing fantasies. Instead, it’s time to honestly examine all the costs and all the benefits of every energy source—wind, solar, oil, coal, natural gas, and nuclear.
Greenhouse gas emissions are a concern but not the only thing we need to consider when discussing energy and the environment. Here are five principles to help us evaluate the best energy options to protect both people and the planet.
One. Reliability: A reliable energy source provides power 24/7/365. States and countries that have doubled down on renewable sources face energy rationing and power blackouts.
Two. Affordability: The cost of energy affects the cost of everything else. If energy isn’t affordable, ordinary people can’t heat and cool their homes, and businesses can’t make the products we want and need.
For the full script, visit: https://www.prageru.com/video/confessions-of-an-environmentalist
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This video needs to be re-made.
The message is fine, but the speaker claims to be experienced in the energy field yet he does not pronounce "nuclear" correctly. That seriously impacts his credibility.
Token efforts by governments are a way of concealing the fact they aren’t taking sufficient action to stop climate change and are trying to use the crisis to their strategic advantage.
The basic problem with this video is it doesn’t give its position on climate change. Why not?
Implicitly it says there is no problem and we can continue to burn fossil fuels to meet our energy needs. But is that his position?
Also the bottle neck for renewables in many places is energy storage. This isn’t mentioned either.
My concern with this gentleman’s view is that he still sees fossil fuels as detrimental to the environment. Simply put we need carbon emissions to grow food. The environmental levels at 400 parts per million are no where near levels of concern as in greenhouses levels are brought up to 1000 parts per million. Carbon isn’t the problem it is made out to be.
Finally someone who makes sense! I love the environment & believe we should take care of it, but many of these so called "green" policies are ludicrous & impractical. That's why I like this 5 principles are practical.
There is no climate crisis.
Environmentalists caused the huge plastic problem when THEY lobbied to stop the use of paper bags, paper plates, paper cups, etc. Nitwits blame everyone but themselves.
This presentation is ludicrous. Praeger U is not a university but a promoter of rightwing nuttery and ignorance. Praeger wouldn't know science if it bit……
😂
Biden and Trudeau are just leftist pawns!
Thanks for the honesty.
Make nuclear energy great again. I ❤ fossil fuels.
We need a balance of generation methods, primarily natural gas, nuclear, solar and wind. However solar and wind are not reliable so they need to be backed up by grid scale battery storage.
The Wilkes Brothers donated 3 million USD to PragerU in 2016. The Wilkes Brothers are a fracking company.
If you get someone telling you their direct experiences with something and you see that little blue "oh no this is actually what you need to know", then you know the person speaking in the video is spot on. I'd ask how we got here, but I already know.
There are some valid points here .
But I would like to disagree on some points.
First you are talking about reliability. Yes, there should be sun for solar panels to work. Yes, there should be space. You made a argument that solar panels require 75x for space. Why the hell shouldn't we consider putting panels in desert.
Transmission: Entire US grid is interconnected. So, this maybe not an issue
Widespread: you said, only 3% of power comes from renewable sources, you said.
This is because of the oil lobby. We humans subsidize oil industry yet we penalise renewable energy.
It is all about will to save ecosystems.
The irony of destroying nature for "clean" energy escapes so many of the climate alarmists. It's a "we must virtue signal at all costs" mentality
Defeatist attitudes like this hold everyone and everything back. It's hard so we shouldn't bother… loser attitude.
There once a time a few short years ago when the idea of landing rockets was a laughable delusion and now it's a regular thing. What's good is often hard, welcome to the world.
Sorry but extracting billions of tons of dormant carbon and launching it into our atmosphere is now and always has been a bad idea. Will there be additional destruction along the path to fixing our issues? Costs? Sacrifices? Of course there will, but we're still better off doing it so we can get to a point where we can stop. What we're doing now doesn't provide for that.
Just because what you try doesn't work the first time doesn't mean you should stop and admit defeat.
In the end, every country will go nuclear because that's the only workable solution.
So what this video is arguing is that it's cheaper to build nuclear reactors than putting some insulating panels on buildings?
I love to see such honesty. Green Energy is a scam perpetrated by Big Money Interests.