How Green is my Energy
by Geoffrey Luck
June 24, 2011
Take a big deep breath, Bob Brown – savour the 78 parts of nitrogen, 21 of oxygen, and the smidgen of carbon dioxide – and contemplate the folly of your alternative energy ideas. Renewables are not green. That’s the view of one of the pioneers of climate science politics. Jesse Ausubel, Senior Research Associate in The Rockefeller University’s Program for the Human Environment, helped organise the first UN World Climate Conference in Geneva in 1979. He is an avowed ‘deep green’ scientist who believes the essence of being green, and therefore his mantra, is no-new-structures. For years he has been arguing heretical views on energy. In the wake of the Productivity Commission’s scathing comments on renewables, now is the time to listen to him.
Ausubel has a list of heresies that might horrify the true believers in wind and solar power, electric cars and distorting government subsidies:
- Renewables are not green.
- The idea of resource exhaustion is irrelevant.
- Hydrocarbons are not the stored energy of the sun.
- Little more than 50% of energy will ever be electrified.
- Nuclear is green, but nuclear plants must make hydrogen as well as electricity.
- Most surprising of all – decarbonisation has been going on for almost two centuries – without a policy for it.

