Environmentalist legend and self-described founding member of the green movement James Lovelock says that modern day environmentalists are too radical and have perverted the founders’ original intentions.

Lovelock’s no moderate. Now 94 years old, he’s responsible for pinpointing the role chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) play in the depletion of the ozone layer and putting forth the Gaia hypothesis that posits that the Earth is a self-regulating organism. But he also distinguishes himself as an “old-fashioned green” concerned with ecology and conservation.

In contrast to today’s environmentalists, he supports hydraulic fracturing, stating that it will make his home country of Britain “secure in energy for quite a few years.” In response to modern day environmentalists’ radical push to move to a 100 percent renewable energy economy, Lovelock replies that “renewables won’t work – because we don’t have enough sun,” adding that such common-sense doesn’t faze them because they “don’t worry too much about facts.”

He also questions their reverence for wind power given its visual pollution and negative effect on the ecology. “We never intended a fundamentalist green movement that rejected all energy sources other than renewable,” he said. “We need take care that the spinning windmills do not become like the statues on Easter Island, monuments of a failed civilization.”