I don't think this is smugness. The "green movement" (not that there is a single point of contact) usually advocates first and foremost for the reduction in con

I don't think this is smugness. The "green movement" (not that there is a single point of contact) usually advocates first and foremost for the reduction in consumption before recycling -- step zero is to use less of things, not just use greener alternatives, because even those require natural resources at some stage in their production. Energy intensive processes used for example to create wind turbines can in the future be replaced by greener alternatives; just because the current solution doesn't immediately improve things in one respect, it can lay the foundations for future improvement. Think of it as rebasing a company's business logic from an old COBOL monolith to a bunch of modern, independent services that someone in 5 years from now has a chance of understanding (just replace "5" years with "50", which brings to mind the nuclear power plants designed in the 60s peppering the western world). I think the argument for renewable energy would still be valid even if turbines and solar panels were much more expensive to build than traditional varieties, because they are tapping in to renewable energy supplies that make us less dependent on the whims of middle eastern dictatorships. The thing that sells the concept to governments isn't how much energy they require to produce, it's the renewable energy sources they tap into and the diversification of grid supply from monolithic, sparse power plants (and the geopolitics they couple) to local, maintainable facilities.