‘Green’ Obsession Feeds Orthodoxy and Starves Growth – Watts Up With That?

By Vijay Jayaraj

Climate orthodoxy insists that the poorest nations, home to billions who still live in energy poverty, must power their rise from the edge of subsistence using expensive and unreliable solar and wind energy.

But a country desperately trying to build up industry, jobs and infrastructure, had best bet on power sources that can reliably deliver affordable and abundant electricity. Growth of power supply must match increase in demand. Factories, small enterprises, digital infrastructure – and more – need power that cannot be provided by so-called green sources. Reliance on wind turbines and solar panels only delays the economic development so badly needed by people struggling to get by.

Being dependent on weather and the time of day, wind and solar cannot produce electricity on demand. They require massive backup systems — either batteries or alternative generation, the last usually being fossil‑fuel based. Even at industrial scale, batteries can store electricity only for limited durations, making them insufficient to cover nighttime demand or prolonged periods of low wind or cloudy skies.

Growth should not be rationed through blackout management or load‑shedding calendars. Coal and natural gas remain the primary energy backbone of the modern world because of their abundance and reliability. Countries that achieved economic prosperity — among them the United States, Germany, China, Japan, and South Korea — did so on the back of stable hydrocarbon-generated power. That formula remains valid today.

Modern coal power bears no resemblance to the soot‑belching plants of a century ago. Ultra‑supercritical systems operating at high pressures and temperatures throughout Asia achieve thermal efficiencies near 45% and slash local pollutants through advanced filtration. Clean‑tech coal has particulate capture, sulfur scrubbing and wastewater treatment — all proven technologies. Gas turbines, meanwhile, are quickly installed and provide flexible dispatch at competitive costs.

For developing nations, such power sources sustain economic momentum and environmental protection. Reliable electricity supports industrial processes, mechanized agriculture, the information age’s data management and the refrigeration, air conditioning and technologies that ensure comfort and good health. The fixation on “green” energy disregards these imperatives of modern society.

There is no place for climate ideologues when preparing for tens of millions of new electricity consumers, emerging industries and urbanization. Realism and practicality are necessary.

Even the citizens of high‑income nations have become disillusioned. In Spain, consumers face the prospect of constrained power and sky‑high prices. Commentators now question whether Spain’s reliance on weather‑based generation has left the grid dangerously exposed.

The BBC reported that Dutch households are being instructed to curb electricity use at peak hours because “the network is overloaded by the rush to wind and solar power.” Despite being one of Europe’s wealthiest countries with world‑class engineers, the Netherlands faces grid instability.

The Dutch case should be a warning to poorer nations, especially those with urban expansion rates far higher than Europe’s. If a country of 18 million people cannot sustain an energy system dominated by renewables without decades of additional spending, the challenge for nations like Nigeria, Pakistan, or Bangladesh — each with over 200 million inhabitants — becomes practically insurmountable.

The “green” agenda is based on the fallacious hypothesis that emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs), especially CO₂ from power generation, are driving global warming and must be eliminated. This is pseudoscience that is being challenged more widely with every passing year.

Physicists William Happer and Richard Lindzen recently shared their contrarian views on a Joe Rogan podcast that drew more than a million views on YouTube alone.

They describe the popular assertion that CO₂ controls Earth’s climate as “outdated radiative theories of CO₂ warming.” Their 2024 paper, “Net Zero Averted Temperature Increase,” concludes that elimination of fossil fuel use would alter global temperature by less than 0.2 °C — a margin within natural variability. Another analysis debunks the core claim that industrial CO₂ emissions can catastrophically heat the planet.

In other words, developing nations are being asked to cripple their economies to avert a crisis that credible science shows to be vastly overstated. The CO₂ Coalition’s summary report, Effects of Net Zero by 2050, underscores that such policies inflict serious human costs — job losses, inflation and stunted industrialization.

According to the World Bank, 675 million people still lack electricity and another 450 million suffer from unreliable power grids. None of them can be lifted from poverty without abundant, dispatchable electricity generation.

Developing nations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America must stop giving into the “green” madness. They must reject lectures from Western climate scolds who climbed to heights of unprecedented wealth on stairs made of hydrocarbons and now seek to “kick away the ladder” from everyone else.

This commentary was first published by American Greatness on November 4, 2025.

Vijay Jayaraj is a Science and Research Associate at the CO₂ Coalition, Fairfax, Virginia. He holds an M.S. in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia and a postgraduate degree in energy management from Robert Gordon University, both in the U.K., and a bachelor’s in engineering from Anna University, India.