The question was recently asked, Can a city the size of Los Angeles rely solely on renewable energy sources like wind, hydroelectricity, and solar power without the use of fossil fuels or nuclear power plants?

In today’s American and Californian political climate, more and more pressure is being put on utilities (including municipally-owned and -regulated ones) to “go green.” Even natural gas is deemed by environists and their shills in Congress and State legislatures to be so evil it must be eliminated as quickly as possible.

The utter stupidity of this is revealed by questions like this. Because the answer is incredibly dire.

Only by taking control of vast areas of land on which to build windfarms, solar power arrays, and dams with large reservoirs can this be done. And that is disastrous even from the so-called green perspective: doing so thereby creating massive negative impacts on the environment. At the scale needed? Such would probably displace many people living in rural and frontier areas. The impact would be heightened (made worse) by the need to vastly increase the amount of materials (such as rare earths and metals) being mined and refined – at great additional energy costs and with many more detrimental environmental impacts.

Due to the inherent challenges of wind, solar, and hydroelectric, these sources would need to be spread over a large area to minimize the impact of severe weather, drought and flooding, and as commonplace and predictable as the hours of darkness. But scattering them more will just in turn create still more need for power and storage of that power. Particularly since line losses in electrical power transmission would consume much of the energy produced.

These are all unacceptable to the environists (“environmentalists” actually remove most mental processes, hence the name) because the impact is just as bad (we environmental engineers would argue worse) than the burning of fossil fuels and especially than the use of clean and safe nuclear power stations.

But there is more: The environists do not consider hydroelectric to be truly “green.” Keep in mind that the environists want to dismantle existing hydroelectric dams to restore the original environment. This is fully in keeping with their mental attitude towards technology. They also believe that mining is evil, want to protect birds from wind turbines, and already object to relatively small solar power arrays because of the impact on the local environment including wildlife habitat.

The blunt truth is that environists – and the self-proclaimed elite that facilitate them – do not want anyone to have affordable electrical power. Especially not massive urban areas like LA. Indeed, the most radical of greens and the political/financial elite want to see urban areas depopulated: not abandoned but demolished: ultimately returned to nature. It is not just the vast farmlands and ranchlands and small communities of the Great Plains that they want to make into Buffalo Preserves.

They are willing to destroy society to achieve their goals. They are willing not to decimate humanity but to eliminate all of humanity except for 5-10% of those alive today. Including themselves, of course. The growing instability of continent-wide power grids is not an unfortunate defect of converting to “green” power: it is a planned “benefit” (in their eyes). And it is a successful effort on many fronts for them: EVs deny mobility and independence as well as requiring more and more electrical power. Eliminating coal, oil, and natural gas as common and valued minerals helps to further depopulation rural and frontier areas in the American West and the Appalachians – areas where resistance to central government control is part of the cultural foundation. Driving people into urban areas where control is easier. And where they can become part of the massive depopulation effort. Or rather, join the targets of that effort.

But the answer is not to return to coal- and oil/gas-powered electricity production in the four vast power networks that serve almost all of Anglo-French America today (Quebec, Texas, West, and East).

The solution appears to be an easier one, in many ways: decentralization. The insanity of producing coal and firing up power plants in Wyoming to transmit power to Southern California is not the only madness of our present system. Nor is mining millions of tons of coal in Wyoming or North Dakota and shipping by rail to Missouri or Texas. Any more than it makes sense to build and maintain ten miles of power line to supply a ranch or a small processing plant in the middle of Arizona or Utah or Kansas.

Producing power locally in a wide variety of ways to provide for local people can be effective, efficient, and far more sustainable and kind to the environment that the present system. Not just “locally” as in a few megawatts at a power station supporting a few thousand people, but individual homes and businesses providing their own power. Using locally-advantageous mixes of gas- and coal-fired, of solar- and windpower, of geothermal and hydroelectric, and yes, nuclear, at a balance suitable for each unique location. What works well in Lead-Deadwood in the Black Hills will be different than what works in Cripple Creek or Central City-Blackhawk in Colorado, or in Panama City or Walton Beach in Florida. Local is good, different is good.

And they promote freedom. They are not just sustainable from an engineering and environmental perspective, but from the world view of we who love liberty.