There's no "other foot" here: we all want clean air and water, healthy farms and forests, etc. I've never heard "intellectuals" complain about the good things

There's no "other foot" here: we all want clean air and water, healthy farms and forests, etc. I've never heard "intellectuals" complain about the good things oil has provided: energy, nitrogen fertilizer, plastics, pharmaceuticals, and other useful chemical byproducts, and so on. Those things are not the problem. It's the undesirable consequences that are the problem. We are victims of our own success, so to speak. (Just to give one example of how oil itself is not the problem: biodegradable plastic has been commercially available for decades. We could make e.g. plastic shopping bags that lasted only as long as they were needed, but it's cheaper to use nigh indestructible ones. We could use biodegradable plastic straws.) - - - - In re: "a ready and steady supply of energy", I like to remind people that the Sun is a maintenance-free fusion reactor so powerful that it can burn out your retinas from 150,000,000 km away.