While as many as 100,000 people gather in New York City tomorrow to march for the use of more unreliable and expensive energy, over 300,000,000 people will be staying home.

The marchers will be relying on fossil fuels for transportation to get to the event, and relying on mostly fossil-fueled electricity to power their cell phones. They will be enjoying food and drinks which similarly relied on fossil fuels for growing, processing, and transportation. Their clothing relied on fossil fuels.

Their health care and entire standard of living that allows them the luxury of attending the march required abundant and affordable fossil fuels.

Most of these marchers have romantic, emotional, uninformed attitudes about energy. I get letters and emails from them sometimes, advocating nonsensical solutions to the global warming problem, like increased reliance on “anti-gravity”.

After I appeared on a TV talk show with Daryl Hannah a few years ago she told me, “We just need to switch to solar and wind power now”. Such misinformed and naive attitudes are pervasive in the Green movement.

I suspect engineers and others who actually make the country run will not be well represented at the march tomorrow. My father used to say, “those who can, do…those who can’t, teach”. The marchers are trying to teach us how we should live our lives, when they have no clue what life would be like if they got their way.

Someday we will have a realistic, affordable, abundant energy alternative to fossil fuels. But that day is not here yet. And its arrival cannot be legislated or negotiated with a treaty.

It will arrive not through the efforts of politicians and actors, but through the hard work and technical knowledge of geeks (probably employed by a fossil fuel company) seeking to meet the energy demands of every human on Earth. A demand which will never go away, because energy is required for everything we do.

As Germany and other countries rapidly backtrack on their commitment to the use of renewable energy, finding just how expensive and economically damaging it is, we Americans are allowing ourselves to be railroaded into a similar, bleak future.

And maybe that’s the real goal of the People’s Climate March.