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/confess…
20 years ago I coined the term #enviROI, whereby a project to save the planet might seem ‘green’ and noble in ambition, but actually turn out worse for it.
It came from my Civ.Eng days, where the unofficial motto was ‘an engineer can do for shilling what anyone else needs a pound to complete’.
Resources need to be weighed against outcomes.
In green terms, if the enviROI is poor, that means money is diverted away from something that can offer a better result.
Interestingly, in the period since, I have noticed failures in enviROI at the altar of green PR, and hence politics, in an unholy alliance with process taking precedence over product. I got on a ‘Citizens Assembly’ last year run by a council driven insane by #NetZero. Horror story.
Now over retirement age I was pondering continuing my passion for combining environmental benefits for the future with my engineering and ad/marketing/product design experiences. A 3D scanner and printer sit on my desk; WordPress scripts do for pennies what hundreds of thousands hoovered out of the family nestegg decades ago.
With Covid over I started networking again. I was, and am encouraged. There is awesome talent out there, in complement.In creative… designers, SEO experts…
In complement with business, state organ dept. wise.. not so much.
My first foray was a disaster. It was for government funding to reduce plastics packaging. Though late to the game I assembled a local dream team that would be required… mainly in areas I knew were essential but needed funding first I did not have in the personal kitty any more to drive the PR/sales spiral upwards. Which I laid out clearly.
But it was assessed and rejected, rudely, by grey, anonymous number crunchers much more comfy handing millions to corporate entities with pitching departments who handed these folk what they needed to feel safe that all boxes got ticked.
But ticked boxes have got and still get us nowhere. The money for the above was ‘left over’ EU funding, years hence, that still sloshes about. Greedily savoured by consultants, and mentors and ‘experts’… none of whom often actually DO anything.
All so a NGO boss or minister can tootle off to COP 28, job done. No actual result, but process followed to a vastly expensive dotted ‘i’ and crossed ‘t’. So this post resonated. A lot.
I am discouraged, yes. Frankly depressed enough to consider taking my knocks with past glories and fade quietly. The passion is still there. So is the shed. But I am really feeling well past dealing with the system and its idiots any more. We’ll see. I am still attending the odd event.
Who knows who I might encounter to see sparks fly once more?
And actually create things to actually make the world a better place?
Continued heavy rainfall from the Pacific Ocean is reaching California.
I clicked on the link. It went to “prageru” but it said “page not found” for the video itself.
Maybe you have to subscribe to view but seems like that should be the message instead of “page not found”.
Does prageru link to YouTube for some of its content?
I clicked on the white triangle in the middle of the image — video came right up.
Not sure what happened. Never saw a white triangle.
BUT, now there seems to be a direct YouTube link at the top of the post that works.
As far as this guys change, many current “skeptics” accepted was was first presented. (Even Anthony) Digging deeper, they discovered there was reason to rethink what they had accepted without question.
Then politics entered and the “labeling” began.
The actual front will not reach California until overnight, with highs over Nevada blocking it over the Mountains.
By January 15, the flood threat will increase.
Oh, well. It was not exactly fast, but he is here.
Wait ’til he figures out that CO2, the beginning of the food chain for all life on earth, is still at semi-starvation levels and the planet needs more of it, not less; that its tiny warming effect is not in the least bit dangerous; and that the only actual climate danger always has been and always will be global cooling.