I’ve been meaning to note this American Interest post, providing more evidence that the way forward — even if climate change alarmists have a point — is not to slow the economy, but to let it loose to advance and bring technology with it:

… it was coal’s sharp decline—a drop of 18 percent in the first half of this year as compared to 2015—that really moved the needle on America’s energy emissions. And let’s not forget that Old King Coal isn’t being dethroned by onerous regulations, but rather by market forces. More specifically, coal’s demise has been precipitated by the sudden rise in domestic natural gas production that has led to an oversupply (and, as a result bargain prices). This, of course, comes to us courtesy of the great shale revolution.

Anybody who insists that the environment’s salvation must come through heavy public subsidies of a few favored technologies and restrictions of everything else, along with increasingly centralized power to restrict people’s behavior, isn’t in it for the environment, but for power and, very likely, for a cut of the subsidized profits from those favored technologies.

Over the past few decades, multiple movies and TV shows have used plot devices in which the money men invested in old energy sources conspired to undermine fashionable technologies like wind and solar.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen show that portrayed “renewable” industrialists conspiring to prevent fossil fuels from becoming less of an environmental problem of themselves.

Ask yourself this: How would environmentalists and progressives respond if some technological innovation made coal less carbon-intensive than wind and solar and still less expensive?  Would they shift their support to that new technology or continue insisting that “renewables” were the only hope for humanity?

For most, I suspect, the question is rhetorical, because they’re either on the take or in a cult.