Environmentalists love starting new campaigns to indulge their never-ending quest to control the way the American people live their lives. Their efforts are always defined by coercion, deception, demagoguery and blind self-righteousness, not fact-based initiatives or innovative policy proposals,  which  – they always seem to fail to realize – are the lifeblood of civic discourse and the very key to furthering improvements in our society.

Rather, their heavy preference is to push for impractical, far-flung ideological fantasies that conform to how they think the world “should” be, then quickly mobilize an army of ill-informed activists to push the agenda. No issue exemplifies this more than their continued push for 100% renewable energy, and banishing all fossil fuels.

Instead of letting the market decide which form of energy will power consumers’ homes, businesses, and cars, environmentalists think they know best, and are marching down the yellow brick road toward Oz, demanding all energy be renewable (e.g. wind, solar, geothermal) within the next few decades.

Now clearly renewables may provide more energy in our nation’s future than the current (roughly) seven percent it provide today. But should this come to pass, it should be because of market forces such as better technology, lower cost, higher efficiency and sustainable reliability, NOT because a group of self-appointed autocrats demand it, and force taxpayers to subsidize it.

For example, the Florida Sierra Club currently brags that over 51 mayors across the state have embraced their “Ready for 100” campaign to force Florida to eliminate fossil fuels by 2050. This includes the mayors of Orlando and St. Petersburg, who have signed-on to this token and meaningless pledge. Their efforts are part of a larger effort to get 140 developed nations, including major corporations, to sign up as well. Last year, a handful of Democrat senators even introduced legislation to dictate the U.S., should be free of fossil fuels by 2050.

With a completely fictitious headline that “Cleaner, cheaper, healthier energy is here,” Sierra Florida is perpetuating a fantasy that has been proven false time and again. The pledge rests on specious data modeling, a prime of example of which was published modeling by Stanford professor Mark Jacobson, who opined that most of the developed world can be free of fossil fuels by 2050 through a heavy mix of solar, wind, geothermal, hydro-electric and tidal wave energy capture technologies.

But as it’s been noted by those checking the data (a.k.a. ‘reality’), the whole model is a lie, resting on false information that fails to factor in current and anticipated technology. As one author states:

What is the lie? That we can increase the amount of power from U.S. hydroelectric dams ten-fold. According to the U.S. Department of Energy and all major studies, the real potential increase is just one percent of that.

Without all that additional hydroelectricity, Jacobson’s entire house of cards falls apart. That’s because there’s no other way to store all of that unreliable solar and wind energy, given the shortcomings of current battery technologies.

And that’s the problem with the modern environmental movement in a nutshell, pretending a fantasy is a reality, then moving heaven and earth to force consumers and businesses to pay for their experiment, and watch as it fails. They learned this lesson in Australia to disastrous consequences, with consumers there paying 20% more for energy year after year due to a failed renewable experiment.

Forcing renewables on the public and banishing fossil fuels is a popular cause in the media and in Hollywood, with celebrities like Matt Damon and Al Gore lecturing us constantly from their private jets about how evil fossil fuels are to the planet, yet their actions never back up their rhetoric.

Case in point is Apple, who brags about how the company is powered by 100 percent renewable energy, but in fact it is an entirely false claim. Apple’s facilities and data centers are attached to traditional fossil-fuel powered electric grids. Their claim of being an entirely renewable energy based company is a lie, bought and paid for through energy credits, solely to brandish their image and their brand. So despite what they say, when you switch on your iPhone or use the iCloud, you’re tapping into a grid providing reliable and affordable energy courtesy of coal or natural gas.

The reality to this day remains that wind and solar are both highly unreliable, like the sun and wind that they depend on. This may change in time, but this is what markets and consumers should depend on – time to let technology develop and see what the future of innovation holds. Americans can’t power their lives on lies and fantasies from delusional environmental fanatics.