According to Mills, a central theme of the EarthDay 2000 s event concerns using the sun, wind, and other renewable sources to generate energy in order to end dependence on fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are the product of the long and natural conversion of plants and animals that have been concentrated and converted into a useful form over millennia. Even though renewable energy is abundant, Mills dismisses the point as irrelevant. All energy in nature whether renewable or fossil is abundant.
Environmentalists don t tout fossil fuels natural abundance as an opportunity.
They see it as a problem. The measure of whether or not a resource is useful is what matters, and that depends on a number of factors. What makes using renewable energy resources worse not better is that they require vastly more intensive land-use than do fossil fuels. Yet it is the most widely and oft-repeated. But then, similarly, there is no inherent cost in the abundantly rich veins of coal underlying the Powder River Basin in Montana and Wyoming, or the abundant deposits of oil and natural gas in the Gulf of Mexico.