"Renewable power is drifting away on the wind like thistledown. The credit has gone; the price of fossil fuels has fallen; it is impossible to work in a country whose people treat wind farms like the Black Death. The investors have blown overseas or put their cash back into coal.

So James Lovelock’s timing is, to say the least, eccentric. Just as several major companies reveal that they are packing their bags, the venerable father of Gaia theory, possessor of one of the world’s greatest minds, announces in Sunday’s Observer that “intemperate injunctions about green imperatives could make [environmentalism] as dangerous” as the ideology of the Axis Powers(1). He told the Guardian that a new planning regime for wind farms is “an erosion of our freedom [that] draws near to what I see as fascism.”(2) His grounds? The energy secretary Ed Miliband had mused that it should be “socially unacceptable to be against wind turbines in your area - like not wearing your seatbelt or driving past a zebra crossing.”(3)

I have great respect for Professor Lovelock. He has done more to advance our understanding of the planet’s response to climate change than any other living person. But he appears to be suffering from an acute case of bellamoids*. He is old enough to know what fascism looks like. It embraces a wide and contradictory set of movements, but its common feature is violence in the pursuit of political aims. If Professor Lovelock knows of people who have been killed as a result of their opposition to wind farms, he should tell us." 31-Mar-09

The entire article can be found at: http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/03/31/an-attack-of-the-bellamoids/

It will be interesting to see how we view his comments, made today, in 10 years. For even now his most poorly received  proclamation of 2004, that nuclear power was the solution to global warming, is suddenly one of the viable solutions. It was a pretty crazy idea in 2004 for an environmentalist.

Looking at the projections for China, India, and other countries CO2 emmissions by 2030, even if the US dropped to zero CO2 emmisions, the climate changes are dire.

Maybe not so crazy, he.

Maybe we should use our resources to figure out how to live in a flooded plain, rather than using them to patch a failing dike?

"Oh Canada!"

A billion people is about the population level that existed before we began using fossil fuels to extend this planet's carrying capacity for our species, by a factor of almost 7 now. If things go seriously pear-shaped, Lovelock's projections could be quite accurate. And it's not only climate that could affect this, but our impending energy famine as well. In short, this sort of gloomy scenario is over-determined, so to speak. Still, it makes more sense to me to redouble our efforts than indulge in despondency. "Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will," as Antonio Gramsci once observed. I think that's the best mindset to maintain in the face of our challenging predicament.

Would most brilliant thinkers in history be invalidated "in toto"  because of thier mistakes? I am not sure, for we usually hear only of their successes. Though Edison freely admitted he made many more wrong predictions that correct ones.

Clearly, "Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will," is a good strategy. Maybe the only hopeful one for the (me) pessiac ones.

I have more respect for Lovelock than for any of the other so-called environmentalists I've heard promoting nuclear power (such as Patrick Moore, who was one of the founders of Greenpeace but is now nothing but a sellout shill for the nuclear industry).  But people who obsess on global climate change to the exclusion of other severe ecological problems caused by humans do no good, regardless of whether their hearts are in the right place.  Nuclear power is a nightmare for the planet, and if Lovelock doesn't understand that and thinks that nukes are "green," he's definitely lost it.